As Protestant Christianity continues spreading westward in the months following the war, Baptists, never a majority religious faith in the North, often find themselves a distinct minority on the expanding frontier. Such is the case today in the establishment of the first church founded in Ames, Iowa, a community established in 1864. The few citizens…
Some Baptist churches North and South during the war hosted political meetings, discourses or politicized sermons. In the North, calls for freedom for all were typically voiced, while such meetings in white Baptist churches of the South insisted upon the maintenance of freedom for whites only. One church that hosted political meetings in the North…
The annual meeting of the Georgia Baptist Association continues today. Gathered in the Bairds Baptist Church in Oglethorpe County, the white Southern Baptist delegates in several resolutions address post-war changes in the South as pertaining to religion. It is “the sense of this organization and its earnest wish,” one resolution reads, “that the Southern Organizations…