Not all white Southerners are supporters of the Confederacy. Throughout the mountainous regions of the South in particular, an area where slaves are a relative rarity while poor whites struggle to eke out a living from the land, strong pro-Union sentiment was present prior to the war and remains to this day, increasing as the…
Not surprisingly, Baptists North and South routinely speak unfavorably of their national counterparts. Rhetoric flows from pulpits and in print, the latter being more common in the South simply because there are far more Baptist newspapers operating in the Confederacy than in the United States. In addition, the war is almost exclusively battled on Southern…
Today, Edwin Stanton, the U.S. Secretary of War, gives Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew permission to begin recruiting black troops for the first U.S. colored regiment. Andrew sets about assembling officers for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, all of whom are to be white, as mandated by the government. Among the officers selected is Colonel Robert…