Free Will Baptists, equating Christian faith with human freedom, and human freedom with God’s blessings upon the American nation, remain consistent abolitionists throughout the Civil War. The tide has not yet turned decisively for the Union, but Lincoln‘s Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of the year has encouraged abolitionist Baptists that victory over the slave…
In today’s edition of the Georgia Baptist Christian Index, editor Samuel Boykin extols, with soaring rhetoric, the virtues of his fellow Southern whites — and the loyalty of African slaves — in the midst of the war, encouraging all to resist the enemy and remain faithful to the ideals of the Confederacy. Our people, be…
Fifteen miles north of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Confederate forces from Texas strike a Union supply area at Milliken’s Bend in an attempt to loosen U.S. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant‘s siege of Vicksburg. The supply depots and hospitals at Milliken’s Bend are guarded by black soldiers, many of whom were until recently enslaved men. Armed with inferior…