Burnside Landing on Roanoke Island
Today marks the beginning of a great victory, by some accounts, for the United States. Off the coast of North Carolina, U.S. Brig. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside and 7,500 soldiers, having sailed from Fort Monroe near the Virginia coast, land on the ocean-side beach of Roanoke Island. Preparing for battle today, the following morning Union forces assault Confederate forts on the island. Outnumbered more than 3-1, the overwhelmed Confederates surrender after losing some one hundred men. Union forces take captive 2,500 soldiers and 32 guns. Thus securing an important outpost on the southern Atlantic coast, Burnside tightens the Union blockade of the South.
Meanwhile, readers of this week’s edition of North Carolina Baptists’ Biblical Recorder receive assurance, should they need it, that their Baptist paper is providing extensive coverage of the ongoing war. Editor J. D. Hufham offers these words in response to an unusual letter recently received:
A brother writing to us to renew his subscription, suggests that we should give more space to the war, so that our subscribers may be saved the expense of taking another paper. This is the first complaint that we have received, and we confess that we are unable to see the reasonableness of it. From the commencement of this struggle we have attempted to give every week a summary of what had been done, and numbers of our readers have been so well satisfied with it that they have taken no other paper. We do not pretend to lay before our readers all the rumors and falsehoods and speculations which are published in the daily papers, but we do furnish every week a full and reliable summary of the progress of the war.
Indeed, the Baptist newspapers of the South, such as the Recorder, are giving unprecedented coverage of secular events. On the other hand, many Baptists of the South view the war as a religious story — a battle between God’s kingdom (the South) and Satan’s kingdom (the North).
Sources: “Battle of Roanoke Island,” National Park Service (link); “The Battle of Roanoke Island,” National Park Service, including illustration, Library of Congress (link); “The News From the War,” Biblical Recorder, February 5, 1862 (link);
