During the war years Southern Baptist elites have constructed a narrative of a Christian Confederacy and a Satanic Union, at least one to the point of labeling the abolitionist North as the “final Antichrist.” Abolitionist Christians—and that includes a seeming majority in the North by this point—are, according to this storyline, the very instruments of…
Newspapers in the Confederate capital of Richmond typically maintain as positive a view of the war as they can muster. Today’s Richmond Daily Dispatch counters “Yankee accounts of the misfortunes” of the Confederate’s Army of the Tennessee. Having “suffered only an inconsiderable loss in numbers,” the army is now in South Carolina under the command…
In the middle of the bitter winter cold, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, embedded in the trenches near Petersburg, writes to the Confederate Secretary of War in the nearby Southern capital of Richmond. The subject is army desertion. “I have endeavored to ascertain the causes [of the] alarming frequency of desertions,” the general writes. Lee…