Several items in this week’s North Carolina Baptists’ Biblical Recorder offer perspective on Southern Baptist views of the nearly one-year old war.
The extent of white Southern Baptist hatred of U. S. President Abraham Lincoln is evident:
The Church bells of the Southern cities are rapidly going to the foundry to be converted into cannon. This is not very different from their former use. Hitherto they have summoned God’s people to battle against Satan. Hereafter, they will be equally efficient in fighting the forces of the Vice-gerant of the Prince of Darkness. Nor will the loss greatly discommode the churches, as a good bell in the pulpit superceedes the necessity of one elsewhere.
Another excerpt continues the theme of Lincoln-bashing:
Mr. Lincoln is accused by the New York “World,” a staunch Republican organ, of tyranny more atrocious than the acts which cost James II. his crown, and Charles I both his crown and his head!–The “World” says with truth, that “never before, since the barons of England exacted Magna Carta, did the Anglo-Saxon race submit to such an assumption of power.”
Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, by contrast, is embraced as a godly hero:
A writer in the [Virginia Baptists’] Religious Herald says that at the union prayer-meeting in Winchester, General “Stone-wall” Jackson was present one afternoon and led in prayer. Would that all our officers were men of prayer.
Sources: “Church Bells”; “Tryanny”; and General ‘Stone-wall’ Jackson a Man of Prayer,” Biblical Recorder, April 9, 1862 (link)
