The Civil War era bisects the early decades of expanding Baptist scholarship North and South. Higher educational opportunities for Baptists of the North were introduced with the founding of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in 1764, after which more Baptists institutions, both North and South, were birthed in the early nineteenth century. By the…
Today LaFayette Church (1816-1907), an appropriately-named American Baptist minister, is commissioned as a chaplain of Company D, 26th Michigan Infantry regiment. Born in Wayne County, New York, Church moved to Rhode Island as a teenager before settling in Michigan in 1836. There he married Sophronia Benjamin (1823-1911) in 1840. Together they have ten children, seven…
While three years of fragmentation have brought little healing between North and South, there are growing signs that reconciliation is possible, evidenced in a surprisingly positive response–from certain states in the South–to U. S. Abraham Lincoln‘s four month-old offer of amnesty and reconstruction. Yet even within the glimmers of reconciliation remains a stark reality: the…