Beecher Bible and Rifle Church in Wabaunsee, Kansas

wbull1

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I could guess that the reference is to the Antebellum "Beechers bibles," a code word for the rifles purchased to be sent to anti-slavery forces in Antebellum Kansas territory -- by Henry Ward Beecher and associates.
 
That's in the same neck of the woods where my GG Grandfather spent the war with the Wisconsin 9th Light Artillery. He was at Council Grove and then Fort Riley before moving on to Fort Scott at the end of the war. All things considered, it was probably the best place to send a man in his mid-40's.
 
What is the connection with the Rev. Beecher other than the name?

Excerpted New York Tribune article about the Congregationalist Minister, February 8, 1856:

"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."

[Atchinson and Stringfellow were pro-slavery men in Kansas at the time]

and an excerpt from https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/beecher-bibles/11977 :

"...Rapidly thereafter the Sharps rifle became known as a 'Beecher's Bible.' This appellation was further encouraged by the marking of the cases in which the rifles were shipped as 'Books' and 'Bibles,' a concealment that appears to have served a double purpose; both hiding the identity of the contents from the proslavery men and keeping the emigrant aid companies from any difficulties with the federal and state authorities who had forbidden the shipping of arms to the region.

Although Beecher's Bible is the most common name for the Sharps rifles and considerable numbers were shipped as books and Bibles, there is some evidence they were also shipped as other items, such as machinery and medicine. The total number of Sharps that reached Kansas between 1854 and 1858 will probably never be known. Fragmentary records indicate somewhere around 900 to 1,000 Sharps were purchased for the border conflict."
 
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I could guess that the reference is to the Antebellum "Beechers bibles," a code word for the rifles purchased to be sent to anti-slavery forces in Antebellum Kansas territory -- by Henry Ward Beecher and associates.

No doubt, but it still seems odd in the name of a church. Perhaps they were "putting on the whole armor of God" as Paul advises in Romans and Ephesians :wink:
 
Nice link provided about the church!!! Odd that "Santa Fe Trail" was on the GRIT TV channel the other night. Warner Bros. got some of that right with the bibles and rifles. It's a great movie if you're a fan of most of the motion picture stars cast for that production.
 
...The total number of Sharps that reached Kansas between 1854 and 1858 will probably never be known. Fragmentary records indicate somewhere around 900 to 1,000 Sharps were purchased for the border conflict."

...as a related aside, there's was an extended thread here denying that military-grade rifled weapons were easily available for general purchase in the years leading up to the Civil War and during the Civil War. The denial claimed that just plain folks, farmers in the main, wouldn't anyway have known how to effectively bear such late-technology weapons; the breech-loading rifles like the Sharps and Henrys. The deniers then also pose that our Country was not after all the gun culture that it was claimed to be, that it's a myth.*


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* this then was extended to be the reason the average recruit could barely hit the side of a barn (a related claim), which then was further extended to mean that rifles were not a significant factor in the Civil War compared to smooth-bores (another related claim) a theory expounded by some revisionist CW authors of late. And yet, numerous vintage (and successive) period newspaper ads make it abundantly clear that military-grade weapons were available, and in quantity, to anyone having the cash for them (i.e Beecher and John Brown for two) in the years leading up to the CW and during the CW. That indicates that men (and women) knew how to use them sans Army training, which is backed-up by so many accounts in County histories all across the U.S. And before it's mentioned, these state-of-the art weapons were for the most part not denied for purchase -- by government edict -- beyond the war zones.
 
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Would think it was little different then today, in that if one compared Urban vrs Rural there probably was huge difference in gun ownership and familiarity even back then.
 
Thanks to everyone who weighed in with more information. The breechloader was simple to load and fire. Women and children could learn the steps quickly with minimal training. The rate of fire was far superior to a muzzleloading rifle.
 
Thanks to everyone who weighed in with more information. The breechloader was simple to load and fire. Women and children could learn the steps quickly with minimal training. The rate of fire was far superior to a muzzleloading rifle.

Good point. They wouldn't have found breechloaders double- or triple- or twenty-threefle-loaded or had green troops firing their ramrods at the enemy.

On the other hand, there's a difference between purchasing hundreds of rifles over a period of several years and providing hundreds of thousands to equip a rapidly mobilizing army.
 
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