Beecher's Bibles

"Beecher's Bible" was the name given to the breech-loading Sharps rifle that was supplied to and used by the anti-slavery combatants in Kansas, during the Bleeding Kansas period (1854–1860).

The name "Beecher's Bibles" in reference to Sharps carbines and rifles was inspired by the comments and activities of the abolitionist New England minister Henry Ward Beecher, of the New England Emigrant Aid Society, of whom it was written in a February 8, 1856, article in the New York Tribune:

He (Henry W. Beecher) believed that the Sharps Rifle was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles. You might just as well...read the Bible to Buffaloes as to those fellows who follow Atchison and Stringfellow; but they have a supreme respect for the logic that is embodied in Sharp's rifle.

The arms purchased by anti-slavery organizations were, on at least one occasion, shipped in wooden crates marked "books," though there is no verifiable evidence for the colorful legend that firearms were shipped in boxes marked "Bibles." The New England Emigrant Aid Society also disguised shipments of arms intended for Kansas in crates marked "tools", and possibly in boxes identified as "machinery" and even "German immigrant trunks". Beecher himself contributed funds for the purchase of Sharps carbines and, after the interception of shipments by pro-slavery men, is said to have issued carbines and real Bibles to individual abolitionists bound for Kansas.

The weapons were intended for the conflicts fought over slavery in the Kansas Territory, leading up to its induction into statehood in 1861. As decreed by the Kansas–Nebraska Act, the issue of slavery in the new state was to be determined by popular sovereignty, but the Territory was incapable of conducting an election that all parties would accept as honest. There ensued a wave of guerrilla violence between pro- and anti-slavery forces throughout Kansas, known today as the Bleeding Kansas period, a dress rehearsal for the Civil War.

The Beecher family was one of the leading abolitionist families in the country. Both Henry Ward and his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe were present at the influential Lane Debates on Slavery, held at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, where their father, Lyman Beecher (himself no abolitionist), was president. It was the first anti-slavery conference in the United States, and for the first time the direct testimony of a former slave (James Bradley) was used as evidence of the horror of American slavery. Harriet went on to publish in 1852 the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, a real best-seller, "the talk of the town".

References

• Kansas State Historical Society
• Marcot, Roy - Marron, Edward - Paxton, Ron. "Sharps Firearms: The Percussion Era 1848 - 1865"