As battles rage on the outskirts of the Confederate capital of Richmond, Henry Martin Tupper, born in 1831 in Monson, Massachusetts, today graduates from American (Northern) Baptists’ Newton Theological Institution (otherwise known as Newton Seminary). The war may have seemed distant to Tupper during his studies at Newton, but within weeks of graduation, on July…
Amidst the desolation and death of war, moments of beauty remain. Today, Benjamin Johnson Lang (1837-1909) makes his debut as a conductor in Boston with the city’s first performance with orchestra of Mendelssohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht. Lang is the organist of one of the most musically-talented Baptist congregations in America: the first Baptist Church of…
While the Civil War disrupts much of Baptist life, as it does the life of the two American nations, Baptists continue their nineteenth-century pattern of growing through the establishment of new congregations. By the Civil War-era, the momentum of Baptist growth had swung to the South, although the war itself, by severely disrupting southern society…