previous next
[354] had at all, and only ceased when the army was disbanded. Really they did not cease then, for in the great revivals with which our Churches in Virginia and the South were blessed during the summer and autumn of 1865 a very large proportion of the converts were from among our returned soldiers. I witnessed myself a large number of professions of conversion among them, and in the meetings in which I preached (acting as an independent evangelist from the mountains to the seaboard after I had ‘laid by’ the corn and threshed the wheat, for I took off my coat and went into the field to work on my return from the army), I always found our returned soldiers the most tender and impressible part of the congregations.

Not as claiming by any means any special activity or special success, but merely as illustrating how God helped us in our labors, and blessed our poor efforts during this period, I give the following report of one of the missionaries for the year beginning October I, 1863, and ending September 30, 1864. It may be proper to say that on October I, 1864, I accepted an appointment from the Virginia Baptist Sunday-school and Publication Board as missionary-chaplain to A. P. Hill's Corps, and that this report only embraces my labors for the year named:

Headquarters, Third Corps, A. N. Va., near Petersburg, October 1, 1864.
Rev. A. E. Dickinson, General Superintendent:
Dear Brother: I have given you from time to time informal reports of my work, but now that a year has elapsed since I entered the service of your board, it is perhaps expected that I should send you a more formal report of my labors.

I have confined myself chiefly to those regiments and brigades most destitute of ministerial labor; but would take occasion to say that I have been treated by the chaplains of all denominations with uniform courtesy and kindness, and have invariably found both officers and men ready to afford me every assistance in the prosecution of my work.

In the past year I have preached 161 sermons—generally to large and attentive congregations. I have baptized 222. I have no means of knowing the number of Bibles, Testaments, tracts, religious papers, etc., I have distributed, but I have given large attention to this most important work, have tried always to keep a supply on hand, and have seldom gone to the hospitals


Richmond VA, 1887.

Tufts University provided support for entering this text.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Headquarters (Washington, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
A. P. Hill (1)
A. E. Dickinson (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
October (2)
1865 AD (1)
October 1st, 1864 AD (1)
September 30th, 1864 AD (1)
1864 AD (1)
1863 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: