“How Dare Men Mix up the Bible so with Their Own Bad Passions”: When the Good Book Became the Bad Book in the American Civil War

Abstract

This essay examines how the American Civil War (1861–1865) transformed the material nature of the Bible such that some copies did not operate in the ways Anglo-Americans expected them to work as the inspired words of God. According to U.S. law, Bibles shipped to the Confederate States were contraband: illegal objects that should be confiscated before reaching enemy hands. Classifying Bibles as contraband led to the widespread notion that Bibles assumed national identities in their work for God. Protestants marked and printed Bibles as war objects that worked specifically for (or against) the Confederate States or the United States. They deployed these Bibles against other Protestants as powerful weapons of God. According to some, Bibles of enemy Protestants operated as immoral books that threatened to undermine God, God’s people, and the military victory of God’s favored nation. Thus, Bibles realized multiple and, sometimes, competing material natures. Confederate and Union Protestants put Bibles to work as powerful objects that mediated God’s presence on earth, materialized debates over slavery, killed enemies, and stopped bullets. Some Bibles functioned simultaneously as God’s Word, commodities, contraband, weapons, shields, and talismans. Each side attempted to hinder the progress and agency of enemy Bibles by capturing volumes as prisoners of war, stealing copies as souvenirs, and destroying books as powerful enemy weapons. The harsh and violent realities of the Civil War initiated a crisis in the material nature of Bibles such that some copies of the Good Book transformed into the Bad Book.

Keywords:

• American Protestantism
• Bible
• Bibles
• the Bad Book
• bad books
• bad Bibles
• American Civil War
• contraband
• weapons
• talismans
• commodities.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the people and institutions that supported my research. Many thanks to David Morgan, Andrew T. Coates, Sarah Dees, and reviewers who commented on early drafts of this essay. Funding for this essay was provided by a 2016-2017 Anthony N.B. and Beatrice Garvan Fellowship in American Material Culture at the Library Company of Philadelphia and a 2014-2015 Mini-Grant from the Religion in North Carolina Digital Collections at Duke University. I would like to thank Nell K. Carlson at the Harvard Divinity School Library for bringing the 1863 Confederate Bible to my attention. I would also like to thank Sarah Campbell Drury and Case Antiques, Inc., as well as the Harvard Divinity School Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Dunham Bible Museum at Houston Baptist University for allowing me to reproduce images for this essay.

Notes

1 “Bible” refers to various forms of scriptures, including Bibles, Testaments, New Testaments, Books of Psalms, Gospels, Books of Common Prayer, and Psalters.

2 On other Bibles that undermined God and God’s Word, see Engelke 2007.

3 On sacred commodities, see: Kopytoff 1986; Geary 1986; Morgan 2015, 71–104; Modern 2011, xv-xxxiv, 102, 115.

4 For the Bible as a “good book” or the Good Book, see: Gutjahr 1999.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jamie L. Brummitt

Jamie L. Brummitt is an Assistant Professor of American Religions at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She researches the visual and material cultures of American religions. Her book Protestant Relics in Early America (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) traces the history and presence of Protestant relics in nineteenth-century mourning practices. Body and Religion published initial research from this project as “‘A Sacred Relic Kept’: Protestant Relics and the ‘Good Death’ Experience in Nineteenth-Century America” (2022). [email protected]