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"Uncle Tom['s Cabin] may all be found in our own tracts!" —— A Wesleyan preacher, quoted in the Christian Inquirer (1853) |
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"From the most ignorant and wretched of mankind we are furnished with some of the finest illustrations of the power of truth and grace." —— Black Peter (1842) |
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As Jane Tompkins notes, the American Tract Society was "the first organization in America to publish
and distribute the printed word on a mass scale."* Along with groups like the American Sunday School Union (publisher of the first two texts
below), it printed millions of copies of hundreds of pamphlets and books during the 19th century. On this page is a sampling of those
works, including one by Stowe herself. The typical tract was bound in paper, about 36 pages long, and often included woodcuts, signs that they were mainly intended for younger or lower class readers. Many, like four of the ones here, tell the story of a non-white "heathen" brought to God, as a testament to the fact that Jesus died to save all mankind, regardless of color, as an admonitory example to white Christians who neglect their faith, and as a more or less subtly worded appeal for funds to support missionaries. There is a lot of repetition in the stories tracts tell, but in a sense that is the point: that wherever one looks — into one's heart, at the landscape, in the Bible or the words of a hymn, among all the classes and colors people are found in — there is one great story being told: that God is, and will redeem the faithful from sin. Thus while instances of social injustice are often mentioned, the wrongs of this temporal and transient world pale before the promise of the everlasting home that lies in the world beyond. |
 Frontispiece, The African Servant (Detail; The Barrett Collection) |
By Rufus Anderson, 1824; rpt. 1831 American Sunday School Union, 1832 Anonymous, c. 1840 By Harlan Page, c. 1840 By A. D. Eddy, 1842 By John Morrison, c. 1842 By Gardiner Spring, 1845 By Charlotte Elizabeth, 1850 Anonymous, c. 1850 By Rev. Legh Richmond, rpt. c. 1850 By Harriet Beecher Stowe, c. 1850, rpt. 1852 |
