Today crowds line Boston’s Beacon Street in celebration of the deployment of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew presents the unit’s colors, after which the regiment parades down the street and to the waiting steamer De Molay for transport to Port Royal, South Carolina. Port Royal and environs, under Union control,…
Within the Confederacy, church, culture and government are so intertwined in support of African slavery that they often speak and act in unison. Southern elites, mostly large-scale slaveholding planters who occupy government offices and other public positions of various kinds, are grateful that Southern Christian leaders (many of whom are also slave owners of considerable…
This year, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, the founding of African Baptist churches proliferates. Unfortunately, the details of the formation of many of these congregations are nebulous. According to one early source, the Fourth Baptist Church, African (later Metropolitan Baptist Church) is formed this month in the District of Columbia “by a few holding…