Six months following the war, guerrilla activity and murders of freedmen are common in the South. Less common in the sight of white southerners, and much resented, are “colored troops.” Today a U.S. Colored Troops officer, Lieutenant J. M. Warren of Company D, 42nd Colored Troops, stationed in Decatur, Alabama, is ordered to take a…
Some Baptist churches North and South during the war hosted political meetings, discourses or politicized sermons. In the North, calls for freedom for all were typically voiced, while such meetings in white Baptist churches of the South insisted upon the maintenance of freedom for whites only. One church that hosted political meetings in the North…
This month U.S. Army Gen. Oliver O. Howard calls for a gathering of Edisto Island’s freedmen. Howard is loathe to break the bad news to the assembled crowd, representative of some 40,000 former slaves who now till what they think are their own lands, given to them by Union General William T. Sherman earlier this…