A Forgotten Spiritual Hero

 

Seven Haskell brothers would go on to serve in the Confederate Army, and while leading his battalion of sharpshooters at Gettysburg, William was killed in action. In a postwar memoir, his brother John C. Haskell described  William as “deeply and simply religious as any man ever was, never obtruding it on anyone out of place, but never failing to assert it in the right place. More than one clergyman has told me how William’s life in the army had converted him and made him devote his whole life to the church.” Also: "Seven Blackbirds"

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Daniel Baker (1791-1857) is all but forgotten today, but in the first half of the nineteenth century this Presbyterian minister was a well-known and profoundly influential evangelist in America.  Born in Midway, Georgia, he was educated at Hampden Sydney College in Virginia and at Princeton.  He held several pastorates, including one in Savannah, Georgia, but spent most of his life in the ministry as an itinerant evangelist, traveling to many parts of the country including Ohio, Alabama, and the Carolinas.  In 1849, he founded Austin College in Texas.

Dr. Baker’s preaching sparked major religious awakenings in South Carolina, most significantly in the 1830s in Beaufort District, where he was responsible for the conversion of a number of young men who would go on to become influential ministers and hold high office in their respective denominations.  William J. Grayson, editor of the Beaufort Gazette, wrote of Dr. Baker’s services at Episcopal and Baptist churches in Gillisonville, Grahamville, and Beaufort, proclaiming that “never, surely, since the days of the Apostles has more fervid zeal, or ardent piety, or untiring labour been devoted by a Christian minister to his cause.”

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