James D. Porter, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 7.1, Tennessee
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

[275] moral conduct among the soldiers. Regular Bible societies were organized for the publication, sale and gift of Bibles, with a special reference to dissemination in the army. Religious newspapers were established in many places, and many thousands of copies were regularly circulated, week by week and month after month, so as to provide fresh and attractive reading matter of good character for the noble boys who were deprived by war of all the privileges enjoyed in life at home. Tract societies printed and published tens of thousands of pages of religious reading, so that by one agency alone, 84,000 such pages were distributed and readily received and read in one month; millions were thus given out and used, and there is no possible estimate to be made of the sum total of the amount eventually provided, or of the good done by this Christian service.

Striking facts, like the following, occurred: The American Bible Society, with headquarters in New York, made a number of donations of Bibles, 20,000 at one time, for our Southern soldiers, and the British and Foreign Bible Society of London donated through a Confederate agent, at one time, 10,000 Bibles, 15,000 New Testaments, and 250,000 parts of scriptures, and it is safe to say that there was no difficulty in finding readers for as many copies as could be brought to the armies. To give further impression of the work done, and to record a word of credit due, I quote from Rev. W. W. Bennett's book, ‘The Great Revival in the Southern Armies,’ who says that the General Association of Baptist churches in Virginia was the first organized body to plan for religious literature to be distributed to the men in camps, and that in May, 1861, the second month of the war, it directed its Sunday school and publication board to proceed at once to provide and disperse through trained colporteurs the results of its efforts in that direction, so that Dr. Dickinson, the superintendent, reported at the end of one year: ‘We have collected $24,000, with which forty tracts have been published, ’