Baptists of Kansas City were involved in the abolition movement before and during the Civil War. In the first two years of the war, runaway slaves (or contraband) found refuge in Union Army camps and towns and cities of the North. Of the latter, Leavenworth, Kansas served as a refuge for runaway slaves in the…
More than two years have passed since U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Since that day, emancipation of slaves has come about bit by bit, and is yet far from complete. Today the latest chapter in this ongoing saga takes place in Kansas City, Kansas, where the city’s remaining black slaves are emancipated,…
Jonathan B. Fuller, a Union man, is one of many Easterners who headed west earlier during the war. Settling in the Kansas City area of Missouri, Fuller, a Baptist minister, set about ministering in churches in a state that, while far from the major armies and battlefields of the great conflict, is mired in a…