The weekend of May 3-5 marked the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Chancellorsville near Fredericksburg, Va. An ambitious reenactment was planned, with armies of men in blue and grey, the sounds of cannon fire and the excitement of make-believe battles. Re-enactors saluted the general of their loyalty: Hooker or Lee.
The Sunday before the battle’s anniversary, April 28, found this columnist in his costume as a 19th-century minister who lived during that time. As William E. Hatcher, I had returned to Spotsylvania to visit Salem Baptist Church, which figured in the Battle of Chancellorsville. The actual church house still stands and, owned by the National Park Service, remains in pristine condition. It is a quiet retreat shielded from a busy highway by a wooded thicket on one side and a cemetery on the other. In the spring of 1863, it was anything but a quiet spot as it served as a fortification as well as a hospital during battle. Earlier in the war, it had been a sanctuary for refugees escaping bombardment in nearby Fredericksburg.
Fred Anderson
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The Orange Plank Road, now heavily-used Highway 3, was a scene of turmoil and terror in May 1863. Ralph Happel wrote an engaging history for the National Park Service entitled Salem Church Embattled and in it he pictured the scene. Alabama regiments were around and inside the church “amid the clutter of furniture stored there by the Fredericksburg refugees.” The historian continued: “[The company was] directed to fire from the lower windows and from the windows in the gallery. Where the country people had made a joyful noise unto the Lord, the guns of war were ready to sound this Sunday, and there would be, instead of the evensong of thrushes, the singing of musket balls.”
Thousands of men on both sides of the conflict were engaged in the area. Again from Salem Church Embattled: “Everywhere the numbers of the wounded taxed the facilities of treatment. At Salem Church, house and yard turned to hospital. Wounded and dying carpeted the ground where the refugees had cooked their gypsy meals. Inside the church, surgeons hacked away, doing their best for fellow Rebels and captured Yankees. Fearing gangrene, surgeons were quick to amputate. A Georgia colonel remembered that ‘the amputated limbs were piled up in every corner almost as high as a man could reach [and] blood flowed in streams along the aisles and out at the doors.’ ”
“Burial of the dead was helter-skelter, pending reinterment at more suitable places.” Eye witnesses later recalled seeing “hands and feet sticking out of the makeshift graves.” “To war’s end and beyond, amid relics of death and havoc, windows broken, doors torn away, walls shaken, bricks scarred by the bolts of war, Salem Church stood desolate in a ravaged yard.”
It was after such a terrible disaster that the church’s pastor, Melzi Chancellor, attempted to revive Salem. The church was one of some four which were “on a field” of churches and all of them experienced the trauma of war. One of the major factors in the recovery of Baptist interests following the war was the reappearance in October 1865 of the Religious Herald, which had been purchased by J.B. Jeter and Alfred E. Dickinson. It provided a means of communication among the scattered Baptists.
Salem Baptist Church
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In January 1867 Chancellor wrote an appeal published in the Herald. He pictured the challenges: “Even before the war the four churches which I served were very feeble. I could then afford to serve them with little remuneration. But the war has left me pennyless [sic], with a large and helpless family. The churches, like their pastor, are broken up —all gone, but the land, and that poor, and the fencing destroyed. Even before the war, such was our poverty that the Goshen [Baptist Association] contributed to my support. What am I to do?”
It is amazing that even in the midst of such destitution, Chancellor reported, “God has greatly blessed my labors among this people [and] I have, in little over a year, baptized over 200 persons.” His plea was poignant: “Can anything be done?” The editor added a testimony to Chancellor’s worthiness of support: “He is a faithful, earnest and successful minister. He belongs to an association which, before the war, was widely known as the ‘Banner Association’ in matters of benevolence. But the old Goshen, during the war, was fought over until a goodly portion of it was in ruins and especially the section occupied by brother Chancellor’s churches. If any churches deserve aid, these do.”
At the same time, E.C. Rowe, an enterprising lay member of Salem, started a school at the site which in 1867 had 80 pupils; and despite all the odds against him, Rowe expected the school to quickly double in size. He planned to raise the necessary funds for the school.
Salem reopened after the war, but for a long time, it was a mere shadow of its former size. Before the war, there were 277 members, including 173 blacks. With freedom, the blacks moved along. The congregation dwindled to about 35. The one-room building in time would be restored but congregation-building required heroics. Much of that work fell to the remarkable pastor Walker J. Decker who, beginning in 1876, traveled by horseback across his wide field of churches and slowly reestablished the territory.
On my Sunday visit to present-day Salem which is just across the cemetery from historic Old Salem, my character tried to interpret what characterized the immediate post-war generation. While costumed soldiers will play war at the Chancellorsville battle’s anniversary, this columnist was trying to do more than play-act. I attempted to inspire today’s congregation, seven generations removed from the war, with their heritage. I surmised: “Your pastors —Chancellor and Decker — and the good laypeople of Salem tempered their fears with a deep faith that the same God who had led them from the church’s beginning would not desert them in their long darkness, bringing them into a marvelous light of a better age.”
Salem can reach into its heritage for inspiration in the living of its days in its present. Since 2010, Salem has been served in an intentional interim pastorate filled by Roy Thomas.
Interested in learning more about religion in the Civil War and emancipation? Visit www.baptisthistory.org for information on a national conference to be held on the subject in Richmond in May.
Fred Anderson ([email protected]) is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society.