Days prior to the first major battle of the Civil War at Manassas, nearly a thousand Confederate soldiers are encamped on the grounds of Virginia’s Frying Pan Baptist Church. Confederate soldier J.W. Reid, with the Fourth Regiment of the South Carolina Volunteers, sitting on the church grounds, writes a letter declaring that “I do not…
This month one of the leading Baptists of the South forms a Confederate company in Athens, Georgia: The Mell Rifles, Co. D, Cobb’s Legion Infantry, was raised in Athens, GA, in July 1861, by Patrick Hues Mell, Baptist Minister and Vice Chancellor of the University of Georgia. After Mell resigned due to his wife’s death,…
In a war fought over southern slavery, the “peculiar institution” is not absent from Union soil. Maryland, a border state, is yet home to many African slaves. At the present, however, Maryland slaveholders are none too happy. Well aware that the war is a referendum on the future of slavery – although officially U.S. President…