Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South

As Jefferson Davis paraded through the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, to take the oath of office as the first president of the Confederate States of America, two men accompanied him in his open coach: Alexander Stephens -- the vice-president-elect -- and Basil Manly. A noted southern Baptist preacher, educator, and the most ardent secessionist of them all, Manly had been selected to serve as chaplain to the provisional Confederate Congress and opened the inaugural ceremonies with a prayer. For nearly thirty years, Manly had worked devotedly for the establishment of a southern nation, and in 1861, his sermons and public prayers before church and congress lent moral and religious legitimacy to the new Confederate government. In this, the first full biography of Manly, A. James Fuller analyzes the life and career of this working minister, illustrating the central role of religion in the formation of the Confederacy.Born in 1798, Manly was one of the leading ministers and educators of the nineteenth century. He headed several large urban congregations in South Carolina and Alabama, helped to spearhead the secession of the Southern Baptist Convention from the national denominational organizations in 1845, and played a critical part in the development of Baptist education. He was instrumental in founding several southern schools -- including Furman University and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary -- and was himself a university administrator and teacher, spending eighteen years as the president of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.Fuller argues that Manly brought together the various themes of the broader culture into his own conception of Christian gentility, includinghis actions as the official chaplain to the Confederate government. In Manly's eyes, the Confederacy was the incarnation of God's plan for the South. A planter, slaveholder, and staunch defender of the peculiar institution, he hoped to temper the brutality of bondage by prom