Today LaFayette Church (1816-1907), an appropriately-named American Baptist minister, is commissioned as a chaplain of Company D, 26th Michigan Infantry regiment. Born in Wayne County, New York, Church moved to Rhode Island as a teenager before settling in Michigan in 1836. There he married Sophronia Benjamin (1823-1911) in 1840. Together they have ten children, seven…
Today the African Baptist Church of Darien, Georgia, the oldest black church in the county, is destroyed by the Union 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Colored Regiment and the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers. Most of the town, in fact, is looted and destroyed by the Union troops, under the orders of the 2nd’s commander, Colonel James Montgomery.…
Today near Chancellorsville, Virginia, Union Gen. Joseph Hooker and his Army of the Potomac, having crossed the the Rappahannock River four days earlier, begin a major offensive against Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee’s much smaller army attacks Hooker’s advance with enough ferocity that the cautious Hooker, overriding the wishes…