Today Joseph Andrew Jackson Lightburn, a Baptist minister and boyhood friend of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, is appointed a brigadier general and ordered to report to the Army of Tennessee. He serves admirably throughout the war, afterwards retiring to spend the rest of his life serving as a minister, including at the Broad Run…
Murfressboro, Tennesee, safely in Union hands, has become a magnet for escaped slaves, Confederate deserters and poor white families displaced from their rural homes. In ever greater numbers, the refugees set up camp in and around the city. Many of the poor white refugees take up residence in the yard of the city’s Baptist church,…
With gathering momentum, African slavery is losing ground following the Emancipation Proclamation. Nowhere is this more evident than within Union-controlled areas along the South Carolina coast. In the state where the first shot of the war was fired, and where prior to the war some of the richest men in the nation lived–all large plantation…