Freedom comes to the Confederate capital this day, although many of the white citizens yet remaining in the city see anything but freedom. As the sun dawns, vast destruction stretches as far as the eye can see. Worse yet, soldiers in blue are approaching the city. As one eyewitness, white Richmond resident Sallie Putnam, observes:…
The Civil War has raised a host of issues for white Baptists of the South, a largely rural people who, echoing the early frontier ethos of their spiritual ancestors, frame religion as personal piety rather than social responsibility. Local church minutes of the 1850s and 1860s are often concerned with personal sins such as card…
Today Thomas C. Cheney, soldier in the First New Hampshire Voluntary Light Battery and a member of the First Free Baptist Church Manchester, New Hampshire, writes a letter to his sister, Melissa. As is often the case with soldier letters to home, the subject matter ranges all over. Interspersed with personal queries and notes regarding…