Prior to the war St. Augustine, Florida, a heavily Catholic town named after the fourth century bishop, St. Augustine of Hippo, served as a slave trade center of the Southeast. Augustin Verot, Catholic vicar apostolic of Florida, was as passionate a defender of slavery as were Baptist leaders of the South. His January 4, 1861…
Peter Barrow was born a slave near Petersburg, Virginia in 1840. As a child he was taken to a plantation in Alabama. Earlier this year, perhaps when Union naval and army forces invaded and gained control over the Mobile Bay area in February, Barrow, now a young man, managed to escape. Fleeing to Vicksburg, this…
This month Osgood Church Wheeler is appointed secretary and manager of the United States Sanitary Commission for the Pacific Coast. He joins many other Northern Baptist ministers serving in U.S. agencies that assist freedmen and soldiers. A native of Wolcott (Butler), Wayne County, New York, Wheeler was born in 1816 and grew up in modest…