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The Secession Convention of the State of South Carolina convenes in Columbia’s First Baptist Church, attended almost exclusively by slaveholders determined to defend slavery against the newly-elected president Lincoln, whom they perceived as a threat against the southern institution of slavery. A smallpox epidemic in Columbia would force the convention to move to Charleston, where…
By the time of the Civil War, Georgia’s Christian Index state Baptist newspaper had existed for almost four decades. Headquartered in Macon, and arguably the most influential state Baptist paper in the nation, from 1860-1865 the Index was owned and edited by Samuel Boykin, the son of a well-to-do physician-planter. Boykin was one of relatively…