This is the introductory chapter to Bruce Gourley’s 2015 volume, Baptists and the American Civil War: Crucible of Faith and Freedom. The road to the American Civil War began with the introduction of slavery into the American colonies in the mid-seventeenth century. Slavery was confined to Africans, as English Common Law prohibited the enslavement of…
INTRODUCTION Baptists and other white Americans North and South during the Civil War-era were unequivocal: secession, the existence of the Confederate States of America, and the Civil War were all the result of slavery, the immoral (or moral, depending on one’s race, political persuasion and/or geographic location) institution that served as the economic engine of…
While many if not most white Baptists in the South believed that the enslavement of blacks was ordained by God and necessary for the southern, agricultural-based economy, the Baptist defense of a slave-dependent culture was not monolithic. Slaveholders comprised up to about 20-25% of the white southern population, yet some 1% of slaveholders owned the…