Today’s Richmond Times Dispatch reports:
The Rev. A. T. Spaulding, paster of the Berean Baptist Church, 24th Ward, Philadelphia, has resigned for the purpose, it is said, of going to the South.
Two days hence, Samuel Richards records in his diary:
We hear of Brantley and Spaulding Baptist ministers from Philadelphia returning to their Southern homes driven away by the despotism of the Northern government …
Albert T. Spalding (or Spaulding), thus, is not the only southern Baptist minister from Philadelphia returning to the South during the early months of the war. While Spalding moves to Alabama and pastors a congregation in Selma, fellow Baptist minister William T. Brantley Jr. (sometimes spelled Brantly) resigns his Philadelphia pastorate to accept a call from Atlanta’s Second Baptist Church. In the ensuing years, far from Philadelphia, their stories will again connect.
A Georgia native and 1851 graduate of Mercer University, Spalding had pastored the First Baptist Church of Aiken, South Carolina and First Baptist Madison, Georgia, prior to accepting the call to Philadelphia’s Berean Baptist congregation in 1859. Following his return to the South and a stint with the Selma congregation, Spalding then pastors the St. Francis Street Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama and Walnut Street Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
Brantley, a graduate of Brown University and the more prominent of the two Philadelphia pastors, had previously led the First Baptist Church of Augusta, Georgia (the mother church of the Southern Baptist Convention, formed in that congregation in 1845) from 1840-1848 and taught at the University of Georgia (1848-1856) before accepting the pastorate of Philadelphia’s Tabernacle Baptist Church in 1858. Back in Georgia following his departure from Philadelphia, Brantley remains at Atlanta’s Second Baptist until 1871, at which time the Atlanta congregation calls Albert Spalding as pastor. Spalding thus fills the pulpit vacated by Brantley, who returns North to Baltimore to pastor.
During the war under Brantley’s leadership, Atlanta’s Second Baptist Church suffers when Union General William Tecumseh Sherman besieges and then ransacks the city in the fall of 1864. The actual events of late 1864 and early 1865 as related to the church are unclear, as church records do not exist. The church building, which is not destroyed, is only partially used by the congregation, if at all, during this time. Some church members move to Macon during this period, where they attend that city’s First Baptist Church.
From Georgia to Philadelphia and back again, the stories of Albert Spalding and William Brantley track the rising fortunes of antebellum Southern Baptists, reveal the loyalties reflective of many Baptist ministers from the South, and follow the war-time trajectory of a South unable to overcome northern might.
Sources: Richmond Times Dispatch (link); Samuel P. Richards and Wendy Hamand Venet, Sam Richards’s Civil War Diary: A Chronicle of the Atlanta Home Front. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009, p. 66; “Spalding, Albert Theodore, D.D.” in Cathcart, Baptist Encyclopedia Vol. 3. Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1888, pp. 1088-1089 (including illustration) (link); C. Douglas Weaver, Second to None: A History of Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church. Atlanta: Baptist History & Heritage Society, 2004, p. 20; “Baptist Refugee Meeting,” Christian Index, 4 November 1864, 1.
