The New York Times today reprints a speech on slavery delivered by Kentucky Baptist layman and U.S. Congressman Green Clay Smith (1826-1895). Smith served as a Second Lieutenant in the Army during the Mexican War, after which he graduated from Transylvania University and then practiced law with his father, John Speed Smith, an attorney and…
Today LaFayette Church (1816-1907), an appropriately-named American Baptist minister, is commissioned as a chaplain of Company D, 26th Michigan Infantry regiment. Born in Wayne County, New York, Church moved to Rhode Island as a teenager before settling in Michigan in 1836. There he married Sophronia Benjamin (1823-1911) in 1840. Together they have ten children, seven…
While three years of fragmentation have brought little healing between North and South, there are growing signs that reconciliation is possible, evidenced in a surprisingly positive response–from certain states in the South–to U. S. Abraham Lincoln‘s four month-old offer of amnesty and reconstruction. Yet even within the glimmers of reconciliation remains a stark reality: the…