This week’s Tennessee Baptist newspaper seeks assistance from Baptist women and merchants in the publishing of Bibles for Confederate soldiers.
We do not believe in giving up to misfortune, or to cowering before difficulties, though they seem insurmountable.
When it seemed impossible to print the Word of God in the South for our soldiers and Sabbath Schools, at a time when no move was making in any quarter to procure plates, God opened before us “a door of entrance” and the plates were procured and laid upon the press, and been printed by thousands of copies daily.
The next thing was to procure boards and muslin, etc., with which to bind these captions. Our book binder procured a large stock in Louisville, but the very day before they were to come through the hostilities between Tennessee and Kentucky broke out, a railroad bridge was burnt, and all communication cut off. We have only stock enough to bind Testaments for a short time longer, when the work must cease. Now what can be done? Cannot this seemingly insurmountable difficulty be overcome? It can, if our sisters and the merchants and the shop keepers will give us that which is of little or no use to them, the old pasteboards, lying about their houses and stores in the shape of bonnet and lace, and dress, and skirt, and shoe boxes, etc., and forward them to us at once by express. See the plan in an appeal to our sisters. Those interested in the cause in the South could send us in one week pasteboards [fold in paper] whole Confederate army, and we believe they will answer by an immediate effort, this urgent call.
This work is a good work, and we believe that it will be achieved in spite of blockades. God often tests the zeal and devotion of his people, or rather gives it an opportunity to manifest itself that all may see and admire it.
And a call to Merchants specifically:
Will not each one of you do the bible cause a service by aiding us to pasteboard for binding purposes. If no sister calls upon you this week, will you not gather up every piece of pasteboard in the shape of a band, shoe, lace, or dress box about your store, and about your house that you can spare, and then call upon your brother merchants and grocers, and the families in your place or neighborhood, and gather up all you can, and flatten them into a box, and send them to us, in the name of your wife or child, and we will acknowledge the kindness by sending to you or to her, or to that child a nice Testament with the name in gilt upon the cover. Lose no time in forwarding a box. Put in all the very thickest wrapping paper you may have about the store to spare.
In the Confederacy, white Baptist women, in addition to maintaining home and land during the war, from the home front offer support for soldiers and sons in the army. Helping raise money and supplies for religious reading material and clothing, as well as encouraging men to remain faithful to faith and family, are valuable contributions to the southern cause. Yet in the second half of the war, the influence of many women takes a turn to begging their men to come home and rescue their families from poverty, deprivation and loneliness. These calls by women late in the war result in many soldiers abandoning battlefield for home. In short, women throughout the war years exert significant influence upon the South and the war effort.
Sources: “The Word of God is Not Bound” and “To Baptist Merchants,” Tennessee Baptist, October 19, 1861 (link)
