Christianity and Confederacy are partners in the work of God’s kingdom. So declares Samuel Boykin, editorializing in today’s Christian Index: A free people, governing themselves and establishing institutions comporting with their ideas of popular sovereignty, independence and prosperity, must, if they desire their institution to flourish, and their freedom to result in general happiness and…
Tennessee is home to many poor white Baptists, as Tennessee Baptist editor J. R. Graves is well aware. Acknowledging the circumstances of his readers, Graves often during the war years publishes, or re-publishes from other sources, advice on how to cope with hard times. U. S. blockades on southern trade routes portend a coming year…
Eight months into the war, as the year draws to a close, southerners are concerned about the economic prospects of the Confederacy, now isolated from the manufacturing muscle of the North. Slavery remains the economic underpinning of the South, but the region’s reliance on cotton, enabled by slave labor, is now suffering from an inability…