This month James Stokes Dickerson, well-known Baptist editor, assumes his first pastorate at the Second Baptist Church of Wilmington, Delaware.
Prior to this time, Dickerson served as an editor of New York Baptists’ “Recorder,” the American Baptist Publication Society, and Philadelphia’s “Christian Chronicle.” After his tenure in Delaware, Dickerson would also pastor in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Boston, Massachusetts.
From his Delaware pulpit, over which he drapes an American flag, Dickerson, an abolitionist, publicly advocates for the Union. Declaring that the Union represents liberty, justice and humanity, he insists that the Union must prevail over the Confederacy, no matter the financial cost to the nation: “Anything but disunion – poverty sooner than disunion.”
Dickerson proclaims his belief that a true Christian could not hold a fellow human being in bondage. Yet when the war ends, he seeks restored relationships between Baptists North and South.
A Northern Baptist patriot, Dickerson’s public voice is an example of how many Baptists in the North sided with the Union using religious arguments. Rather than seeking favoritism for his particular faith or the Christian faith at large, however, Northern Baptists typically advocated for liberty and equality for all. Opposed to human bondage, they sought to liberate enslaved humans. While many white Baptists in the South embraced Christian nationalism, Northern Baptists more typically focused on universal human values that could not be separated from – yet were not confined to – their Baptist and Christian faith.
Source: Emma Richard Dickerson, James Stokes Dickerson, Memories of His Life (Wisconsin Historical Society, 1879), p. 293.
