A Collision of Remnants: Sarah Baker Leonard Tupper and the Quest to Build a Post-Enslavement America

This dissertation focuses on the postbellum missionary activity of North Carolinian African American Baptists, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, its missionary Sarah Baker Leonard Tupper, and the academic institution she cofounded in postbellum North Carolina. This research examines the interplay between missions, education, gender, and the racialized politics of the South in the years immediately following the Civil War. Missionary publications, legal documentation, and denominational growth in and around North Carolina, after the war, reveal how informal antebellum networks jettisoned the postbellum aims of missionary societies. This project argues that the achievements of African American Missionary Baptists, and Sarah Baker Leonard Tupper in particular, in North Carolina have been largely unexplored due to the racialization and androcentrism of nineteenth-century missiological publications and the commonplace political violence of the postbellum Southern United States. The scope of this work broadens to explore the enduring implications and legacies of the confluence of this missional activity.