At first glance, today is a typical Sunday at the Union Baptist Church in Tennessee’s Stockton Valley in Loudon County. Inside the plain meeting house with perhaps one hundred or more persons present, preaching and singing fill the morning hours as the temperature rises this hot August day. The sounds wafting through the open windows…
Union sentiment remains high in parts of Tennessee. By the thousands Union sympathizers flee to Kentucky to escape conscription into the Confederate Army, from whence many join the Union army. One such man is Lindsay Cooper, a Baptist who survives the war and becomes a successful preacher, missionary and evangelist in his home state: Lindsay…
In the pages of the Tennessee Baptist, Baptist pastor A. C. Dayton offers a parable of a “patriotic, self-sacrificing Tennessee plantation mistress” (who were actually relatively few in Baptist congregations) and applies the story to churched women: We overheard a conversation some few weeks since, which threw light upon the character of our fair countrywomen.…