Mere weeks before the major spring campaigns are to begin, Confederate Maj. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest today attacks Tennessee’s Fort Pillow. Forrest’s Cavalry Corps are known for their guerrilla-like strikes in Union-held territory in Kentucky and Tennessee. Located on the Mississippi River some forty miles north of Memphis, Fort Pillow is manned by 200-295 white…
In the midst of secession fever in January 1861, the (white) First Baptist Church of Nashville, Tennessee established a “Second Colored Baptist Mission” in Edgefield, east of Nashville’s downtown, on Fatherland Street. The mission church was supervised by a white committee and pastored by George Dardis, a free black preacher. Nelson G. Merry, free black…
Even as the clouds over the Confederacy grow ever darker–or perhaps because the future of the South looks so bleak–the veneration of the deceased Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson as a Southern saint is well underway. Having died less than a year ago, Jackson’s image is the subject of much debate among those who vie…