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…
Religion, long woven into the fabric of the South prior to the war, was used an ideological weapon against the abolitionist North decades before the war began. More to the point, white religion is that which has served to uphold the moral and biblical righteousness of white supremacy and African slavery while creating a Christian…
In the midst of secession fever in January 1861, the (white) First Baptist Church of Nashville, Tennessee established a “Second Colored Baptist Mission” in Edgefield, east of Nashville’s downtown, on Fatherland Street. The mission church was supervised by a white committee and pastored by George Dardis, a free black preacher. Nelson G. Merry, free black…