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…
Today in Syracuse, New York, Winfield Scott, freshly graduated from Baptists’ Rochester Theological Seminary, is ordained by the Seneca Baptist Association. Born on February 26, 1837, in West Novi, Oakland County, Michigan, Winfield is the first son and fourth child in a large family of three brothers and four sisters. At the time of his…
Six months into the war, some Northern Baptist clergy are enlisting in the Union army – not as chaplains, but rather as soldiers. Memories of an earlier generation of Baptists fighting in the Revolutionary War resonate among Civil War-era Baptists. Among today’s enlistees is Daniel Haskell Burdick, Illinois Baptist minister and farmer. Burdick’s service is…