This month Thomas Henderson Pritchard (1832-1896), a Confederate chaplain during the war and more recently the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Raleigh, North Carolina, is called as pastor of First Baptist Petersburg, Virginia A native of North Carolina and graduate of Baptists’ Wake Forest College, a young Pritchard switched from his law studies…
In the early post-war months the African Zion Baptist Church of Tinkersville, in West Virginia’s Kanawha Valley, has emerged as the area’s “main organization completely owned and controlled by Negroes.” Organized in February 1863, the congregation initially met in the home of Rev. Lewis Rice, a champion of religious and secular education for blacks. Considered…
Currency proved critical in the outcome of the war. The North was able to leverage its superior financial resources, including taking on massive quantities of debt. The South, on the other hand, never gained solid financial footing, hampered by an unbalanced economy dependent primarily on one raw product — cotton — whose value crashed due…