Yesterday’s announcement of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation by United States President Abraham Lincoln cheers many Baptists of the North, and re-energizes Northern Baptist commitment to the Union cause of freedom for all. Among today’s new soldier enlistments is that of eighteen year-old George W. Rogers of New York. Rogers is a Primitive Baptist, the same…
The war depletes many Southern Baptist churches of their menfolk. Church officers are not exempt from the male exodus, as exemplified by Jacob Eliot of Corsicana, Texas. Born in New York in 1803 and raised in Kentucky, at the age of 46 Eliot moved to Navarro County, Texas, with his wife, children, and grandchildren. Purchasing…
The war routinely causes confusion in Baptist congregations located in areas of the South where battles take place or where the United States army is otherwise present. Services are frequently disrupted, sometimes for months or years on end, as the war rages on. Today is a day of discord for the New Garden Baptist Church,…