As Georgia prepares for the upcoming slaveholdering states’ convention, and Texas prepares for secession, Kansas is admitted as the 34th state of the United States of America. For six years the scattered residents of Kansas territory, mostly poor white farmers, had struggled to obtain statehood, their efforts held hostage to the heated slavery debate in…
In Georgia, the state’s secession convention continues under the leadership of Governor Joseph Brown, a Southern Baptist. Delegates pass a Bill of Rights for white citizens of the new Confederate state. The document both declares that Georgia is a Christian nation, and disallows a religious establishment: The prevalence of the Christian Religion among the people,…
Before a packed sanctuary at the First Baptist Church of Macon, Georgia, Ebenezer W. Warren, pastor of the Macon congregation, delivers a sermon defending black slavery as biblical. (The Macon Telegraph printed the sermon in its February 7, 1861 edition.) Warren ties slavery explicitly to the Bible and the will of God, arguing that biblical…