While slaveholders, politicians, civil servants, religious leaders and newspaper editors in the Confederacy lament over the losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg and try to sort out the meanings and repercussions thereof, many ordinary Southerners do the same. Mary Beckley Bristow is one of those ordinary Southerners. She is a member of the Sardis Baptist Church…
What do the losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg mean for the Confederacy? This week, while the facts of battle are yet fuzzy and news stories often contradict one another, Southern newspaper editors begin trying to make sense of the recent battlefield defeats. Not atypical of the larger discourse in the Southern religious press this week,…
News from Gettysburg and Vicksburg has spread throughout the South, although thanks to the inefficiencies and shortcomings of communication, the facts are frequently interspersed with supposition and rumors. While yet uncertain of many details about Gettysburg, this week North Carolina Baptists’ Biblical Recorder editor J. D. Hufham breaks the sobering news of Confederate losses at…