As the Confederacy’s largest city — New Orleans — is surrounded by the Union Navy, to the East the annual meeting of the Georgia Baptist Convention convenes at the First Baptist Church of LaGrange.
The travails of the war are evident from the opening session, as both the appointed preacher, and the alternative, for the morning worship service are absent, at least one being involved in army missions. The men assembled are a who’s who of large Georgia Baptist slaveholders and African slavery apologists, including Ebenezer W. Warren, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Christ in Macon, now-famous author of a stirring sermon assuring the South of God’s divine blessings of African slavery. Warren is promptly elected Clerk of the Convention.
Another slavery apologist, Patrick H. Mell, is re-elected as moderator. Mell serves for many years both as moderator of the GBC and as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a committed strict Calvinist, a doctrinal system that offers theological certainty to African slavery and lends its language of Providence in asserting that the South, God’s chosen nation, will defeat the North. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, after the war, that Calvinism quickly declines as a theological foundation of the Southern Baptist Convention and Georgia Baptist Convention.
But for now, the defeat of their Confederacy and decline of their theology are imponderables in the minds of the elite men assembled at FBC LaGrange. Before the day’s closing session, the men vote to set aside “a half-hour in prayer for our country to-morrow morning.”
Source: Minutes, 1862 Georgia Baptist Convention (link); brief biography of P. H. Mell (link)
