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…
Confederate leaders’ mounting fears of insurrection find evidence in the activities of Newton (“Newt”) Knight (1837-1922), Primitive Baptist and Unionist in Mississippi. Knight is leader of the Knight Company, a group of Confederate Army deserters and Confederate dis-loyalists who banded together in late 1863 to form the “Free State of Jones” in the Mississippi counties…