Today the First Regiment South Carolina Volunteers (Union), a regiment of former slaves based in Union-controlled Beaufort, returns from an exploratory expedition in South Georgia and Florida. Many Baptists serve in the regiment. They and their fellow soldiers know that the regiment’s white officers are evaluating their performance as the United States government contemplates raising…
Not surprisingly, Baptists North and South routinely speak unfavorably of their national counterparts. Rhetoric flows from pulpits and in print, the latter being more common in the South simply because there are far more Baptist newspapers operating in the Confederacy than in the United States. In addition, the war is almost exclusively battled on Southern…
Southern Baptist newspapers routinely publish (whether original reporting or in the form of selective republishing from other sources) reports of Yankee atrocities in Union-occupied areas of the South. This week, readers of North Carolina Baptists’ Biblical Recorder learn of “Yankee Outrages in Eastern North Carolina” (the coastal region). This sensational account of desecrations, quite real…