"Adapted to the Soldier's Pocket": Military Discipline, Religious Publishing, and the Power of Print Format during the US Civil War

Abstract

In this article, I consider the surge of pocket-sized books produced for use by Union soldiers during the US Civil War, investigating how publisher choices about print format intersected with military and civilian attempts to manage the health, conduct, and efficiency of soldiers at scale. As objects believed to exert intimate influence over readers' mental and physical habits, books designed for the pocket promised both to aid and to undermine the production of orderly military bodies in nineteenth-century America. Even as reformers and military officials feared the influence of pornography and fiction published in small, concealable formats, religious organizations including the American Tract Society proposed that pocket-sized books could enhance efforts to discipline soldiers' minds and bodies for military success, including by habituating soldiers to hold books instead of playing cards. Meanwhile, the 1863 entry of Black soldiers into the Union Army, which I consider later in this article, prompted variations on these practices that highlight the racialized nature of Civil War-era approaches to soldier discipline. If wartime responses to pocket-sized books show that print formats may accumulate cultural meaning, such responses also demonstrate how works for the soldier's pocket activated nineteenth-century fantasies of individual optimization and population-level control.

During the first year of the US Civil War, the Philadelphia-based Presbyterian Board of Publication released The Soldier's Pocket-Book, a palm-sized volume of prayers, hymns, and scriptural excerpts bound in flexible cloth covers. The Board's annual report for 1861 highlights the "small and unpretending" book's ability to move across vast geographies, noting that "large supplies have been forwarded…as far as possible to all the regiments on the Atlantic coast and in the Gulf of Mexico."¹ Volume editor William M. Engles's preface to the Soldier's Pocket-Book likewise emphasizes that the small book suits new wartime demands on mobility, but also proposes that the book's size might aid the war effort itself. "This little book," Engles writes, "may easily be carried in your pocket…By giving your attention to it, we will engage that you shall be none the worse, and we hope you will be much better. Take it into your hands at leisure moments, and meditate upon its contents."² "Easily…carried," Engles imagines the Soldier's Pocket-Book will occupy soldiers' "hands" and "attention" during "leisure moments," scripting a reading regimen that disciplines both bodies and minds. If pocket-sized books in general anticipate movement across geographic space, Engles expresses hope that they might also function as technologies for managing the habits and behaviors of geographically-dispersed readers.

The Soldier's Pocket-Book belongs to a long tradition of small books designed for military use, which range from the 1643 Souldier's Pocket Bible carried by Oliver Cromwell's troops to the paperback Armed Services Editions supplied to American soldiers during World War II. Yet despite the transhistorical nature of soldiers' books, the Soldier's Pocket-Book also operates in relation to specific cultural and historical understandings of its format. In common English-speaking use, "format" describes a printed item's shape, size, and general material design, while in bibliographical contexts the term historically describes how printers configure pages on the press.³ Unlike bibliographical formats such as the folio or the quarto, however, the "pocket-sized" book is a format category rooted in projected conditions of use rather than a fixed construction pattern. Nineteenth-century books advertised as suitable for the pocket take varied material form and may range from a handsbreadth to about a forearm's length in size.⁴ Understanding their ambiguities—and how pocket-sized books come to mean in Civil War America—thus demands a more expansive approach to format.

Following print and media historians, including Jonathan Sterne and Meredith L. McGill, I understand format here as the "decisions that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium."⁵ As McGill elaborates, formats index choices made "in projecting the form of the printed work" (emphasis original).⁶ When publishers decide to have books printed in a size and shape "suited to the pocket," in other words, they make decisions that predict—but do not prescribe—conditions and possibilities for use. Seen from this perspective, formats are social agreements as much as they are sets of design features. The physical form of the Soldier's Pocket-Book, after all, is no guarantee of its ability to serve as an engine of habit formation. Rather, the Presbyterian Board's claims to this effect register the belief that, in the words of one nineteenth-century commentator, "pocket editions stimulate us to read."⁷ As Sterne writes, formats may emerge from practical necessity but can accrue "phenomenological…value" of their own.⁸

In this article, I seek to recover some of the cultural expectations and behaviors that the pocket-sized book as format category indexed for nineteenth-century American audiences. By examining the surge of small-format books published during the US Civil War (1861–1865), I show how the production and distribution of works for the soldier's pocket intersected with broader attempts to manage soldiers' health, conduct, and efficiency at scale. Although print and print cultures cross regional lines, I focus on materials circulated to the Union Army, in part because the Confederate Army lacked continued access to the US Postal Service and major Northern centers of print production.⁹ Union forces were also uniquely affected by the 1861 founding of the US Sanitary Commission, a civilian reform organization that inaugurated a new era of social surveillance and military systematization centered on individual discipline and the management of physical health.¹⁰

The perceived ability of pocket-sized books to shape reader habits, as endorsed by Engles and others, promised both to aid and to undermine the production of orderly military bodies. In the eyes of civilian reformers as well as military leaders, increased wartime demand for works printed in portable, concealable formats magnified the potential threat that materials such as pornography and dime novels posed to soldiers' health and self-control. At the same time, reform and religious organizations—including the Sanitary Commission, the American Tract Society (ATS), and the American Temperance Union—proposed that certain small-format books could also serve a curative or prophylactic function. Even when not read, these organizations claimed, books sized for carrying could help rescript soldiers' habits of mind and body for Union success, including by physically occupying soldiers' pockets in place of alcohol and playing cards.

Scholars of print culture have tended to view advances in print mobility as emancipatory or access-broadening for inhabitants of the early United States.¹¹ Yet wartime responses to pocket-sized books demonstrate that highly mobile print formats also fueled nineteenth-century fantasies of bio-power. In Michel Foucault's formulation, biopower links efforts to optimize individual bodies ("anatomo-politics") with efforts to manage the health of a population ("biopolitics").¹² Civil War-era missionaries and reformers claimed that pocket-sized books could achieve both individual- and population-level effects, complementing military efforts to train soldiers for efficient integration into the Army system. Such narratives also shored up racialized approaches to soldier discipline. In the first part of this article, I examine how organizations, including the ATS, deployed small formats to shape the mental and physical discipline of white soldiers. I then analyze how the 1863 entry of Black soldiers into the Union Army prompted variations on these practices that foreground physical discipline and reflect white supremacist narratives about proper bodily comportment.

Books, however, would ultimately prove a more unruly form of biopower than supervised military drills. If small print formats promised to establish practices of book use that regulated soldier conduct and health, the relentless nature of wartime propaganda to this effect belied the instability of missionary and reformer discourses of power. As I will demonstrate, real and imagined uses of soldier's books could—and did—diverge. Even as format choices may shape how readers interpret a work's aims, accounts of books adapted to the soldier's pocket show that formats do not dictate use so much as set people, texts, and things in relation.

Works for the Knapsack and Pocket

The Civil War was a pivotal moment in the history of libraries, reading, and publishing in the United States. Widespread soldier demand for print materials collided with mid-century developments in printing and distribution technologies to drive the expansion of American book and periodical publication, even in the face of wartime paper shortages.¹³ During the war, low postal rates for US Army mail set by Congress granted soldiers ready access to newspapers and magazines. Publishers also took advantage of a developing rail system that by 1862 featured designated mail trains, which allowed soldiers on the move to access shipments of books and letters.¹⁴ Meanwhile, commercial adoption of inventions such as mechanical typesetting machines and the steam-powered rotary press enabled Northern publishers to produce high volumes of print at increasingly lower costs, fueling the production of magazines, dime novels, and other cheap print.¹⁵ By the end of the war, the number of US publishers and their press outputs had both increased. So, too, had literacy rates, including among formerly enslaved African Americans.¹⁶

Publishers and other bookish agents active during the war framed soldiers' desire for reading material as intense and unprecedented. As an American Tract Society colporteur visiting Union camps would report in 1862, expressing a sentiment echoed in soldiers' letters, "the soldiers positively will read any thing [sic]. I never before knew what it was to see men crave reading."¹⁷ Uncertain periods of waiting between battles, long hospital stays, and increased US military use of armies of occupation meant that on average soldiers found themselves with more free time than ever before.¹⁸ Reading, along with card playing, became an important means of staving off boredom.¹⁹ Union troops stationed on Florida's Santa Rosa Island, for example, saw early action defending the island's fort against Confederates from October 1861 to May 1862, but spent the rest of the war holding the fort—and complaining of a dearth of reading material with which to fill their off-duty hours.²⁰

Much work on Civil War print culture has focused on newspapers and magazines, which officers and enlisted men alike consumed in large quantities, as well as on diaries that soldiers and civilians used to record their wartime experiences.²¹ Yet printed books also played important roles in soldiers' reading lives. For enlisted men, as library historian David Kaser notes, "even more popular than…full-sized tomes were smaller books that could be easily transported in pocket or knapsack."²² Unlike military officers, enlisted men were required to carry or be able to carry all their belongings on their persons. A Union soldier's kit typically included boxes for rifle cartridges and percussion caps (which soldiers wore attached to a belt), a canteen, a rifle, a bayonet, a haversack for rations and extra ammunition, and a knapsack. As J. B. Waterbury writes in his 1863 tract Something for the Knapsack (figure 1), the knapsack was the "soldier's trunk," which usually contained a blanket, dog tent, extra clothing, and small items such as combs, razors, playing cards, or books.²³ On average, full loads weighed about fifty pounds.²⁴ Many enlisted men also wore federal-issue "sack coats" that offered extra storage in the form of pockets. Although in no way standardized, sack coat pockets were often capacious; the interior pocket on a "1858 model" sack coat made in 1865 measures approximately thirty two by fifteen centimeters.²⁵

Extant copies of books that bear bullet marks or shrapnel testify to the regular presence of small books in knapsacks and uniform pockets. They also indicate that soldiers carried a diverse selection of books, including Bibles, novels, songbooks, and dictionaries.²⁶ Soldier accounts suggest that at times soldiers simply read what they could get: as Union veteran John D. Billings would recall, "there was no novel so dull, trashy, or sensational as not to find some one [sic] so bored…that he would wade through it…the mind was hungry for something, and took husks when it could get nothing better."²⁷ In theory, though, different pocket-sized books met different soldier needs, ranging from spiritual comfort to entertainment. Within weeks of the war's start, the American Bible Society found itself overwhelmed by requests for pocket Testaments, each approximately the size of a pack of cards.²⁸ The US Christian Commission similarly scrambled to locate religious print suitable for use as in-demand "knapsack books."²⁹ Meanwhile, secular publishers, including Erastus and Irwin Beadle, also found soldiers

Figure 1.

J. B. Waterbury, Something for the Knapsack (New York: American Tract Society, 1863). 12 cm. "Fort Granger Franklin Tenn. July 24th 1863" written on back cover. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. Photograph by Evan Cheney.

to be an eager audience for pocket-sized print. By the war's end, the Beadles had sold over four million copies of their "Dime Books," whose lightweight paper covers and petite formats made them well-suited to carrying by soldiers.³⁰ The Beadles' smallest wartime publication, the thumb-sized Beadle's Dime Pocket Songster, makes especially clear how even the most overburdened soldier could carry—and conceal—his reading material.³¹

Injurious Reading

The realization that a soldier could stow a songster in his pocket as easily as he could carry a Testament unsettled both military officials and civilian advocates for moral reform. As Judith Giesberg has demonstrated, a combination of commercial and technological developments made a deluge of erotic and sensational print available to soldiers in Union camps. Military leaders and reform-minded Americans alike complained that the influx of concealable, pocket-sized materials, including erotic cartes de visite and cheap "yellow-covered" novels, had a negative impact on soldiers' profanity use and general conduct in camps.³² For military officials in particular, the presence of pornography and other distracting material in a soldier's pocket also hinted at larger erosions of personal discipline, including the self-control deemed essential for maintaining both individual health and larger-scale military efficacy.

Nineteenth-century audiences understood the act of reading to have entwined moral and physiological effects.³³ Writing in 1864, an agent of the US Christian Commission urged support for the organization's efforts to supply soldiers with books by stating that "a library is a valuable hygienic appliance."³⁴ The Christian Commission was a civilian organization that offered religious and social support to Union soldiers and frequently collaborated with the US Sanitary Commission to provide soldiers with medical services. Its claim that reading could serve a "hygienic" purpose would have been familiar to many nineteenth-century Americans, including readers of Walt Whitman's 1858 newspaper column "Manly Health." As Jess Libow notes, Whitman—who served as a nurse during the Civil War and often read aloud to wounded soldiers—depicted reading as essential to the "maintenance of an active, healthy body."³⁵ In a similar vein, the Christian Commission insisted that its reading materials would make soldiers "healthful and fruitful" by providing "mental and spiritual food" for the "able-bodied."³⁶

The Christian Commission's rhetoric amplifies generalized nineteenth-century concerns about properly masculine national bodies. It also reflects specific wartime discourse that framed securing good health as a patriotic duty. Military doctors informed troops that "a sick soldier is not only useless himself, but encumbers the army" and filled pocket health companions with warnings claiming that "the most potent and unaccountable cause of disease and death, is the utter recklessness and abandon of the men themselves" (emphasis original).³⁷ In texts and sermons aimed at military audiences, authors similarly urged Union soldiers to "practice a rigid self-denial, and rule manfully your own appetites and inclinations," exchanging personal liberty for the nation's survival.³⁸ As George Putnam, the author of a pocket-sized pamphlet titled "The Man and the Soldier," would inform his readers: "You are not your own property now, to waste or to throw away."³⁹

For Putnam and others, including Colonel Lafayette Baker, a reading diet was thus as essential to military success as the nutritious soups that pocket health companions taught men to prepare. Backer believed that "bad books" threatened to "[ruin] the morals and bodies of men" in the US Army and viewed erotica dealers as "human vampires," contending that the "obscene books and prints" they distributed sapped men of their strength to fight.⁴⁰ As Giesberg notes, "vampire" was a common metaphor used by abolitionists to describe Southern enslavers.⁴¹ By suggestively linking improper reading material with the institution of slavery, Baker not only condemned the lack of restraint among soldiers that so concerned doctors; he aired the possibility that a soldier's choice of reading material might indirectly support the Confederacy.

An 1862 painting by William M. Davis (figure 2) offers a sharper rendition of Baker's argument. The image, which also circulated during the war as a carte de visite, depicts a tombstone representing "the grave of Secession" surrounded by objects, including a bottle of rye whiskey, gambling cards, and what one commentator describes as "the literature of the camp; a yellow covered pamphlet entitled 'The Pretty Milkmaid,' the color and the title conveying to the mind doubts whether the production ever emanated from the press of the American Tract Society."⁴² In the commentator's eyes, the "yellow covered pamphlet" presages the failure of "Secession" by underlining the Confederacy's moral wrongs and general dissipation. If the material that soldiers read was believed to affect their health and ability to serve the US military, works such as Davis's painting called attention to the larger social and political stakes.

Figure 2.

Edward Anthony, albumen print carte de visite after William M. Davis, "Done Gone" (c 1862). 10 × 6 cm. Prints and Photographs collection, Library Company of Philadelphia.

Prophylactic Print

Reformers took varied approaches to addressing the problem of soldier reading. In 1864, the Christian Commission introduced a system of portable libraries—each a 125 book-filled, three-foot by three-foot wooden case—which initially targeted soldiers in military hospitals. Although apparently popular among soldiers themselves, the Commission's portable libraries had limited utility: they required resources to transport and maintain, including the presence of a dedicated librarian such as a unit surgeon or chaplain. Compared to American Tract Society distribution numbers, the portable library program also paled in scope. The Union Army contained over two thousand regiments, but the Christian Commission distributed only 215 libraries, plus another seventy of half-size.⁴³

If the Christian Commission sought to reach soldiers by rendering libraries portable, other organizations, including the ATS, turned their attention to portable print formats. The ATS had long published a wide range of small-format materials, but during the war the organization and its supporters invested familiar formats with new significance. Writing in 1863, Fitchburg, Massachusetts, resident George Trask praised ATS tracts as "light artillery" that will "save [soldiers] from camp vices," comparing the small pamphlets to the military unit designed to lead the charge into action.⁴⁴ Such descriptions invoke an established Christian tradition of viewing God's word as a protective weapon. Yet they also index how nineteenth-century audiences reframed pocket-sized print as a format category especially well-suited to soldiers' wartime experiences and needs. Already valued for their lower production costs and ease of distribution, small print formats garnered praise for their perceived ability to out-compete and obstruct the circulation of "yellow-covered novels," playing cards, and other portable objects associated with camp vice. John Lardas Modern has argued that throughout the nineteenth century the ATS championed the mass circulation of its texts in order to "align individual opinions with the same script."⁴⁵ ATS responses to soldiers' books, however, emphasize that the organization sought to align not only opinion but also reading practices, appetites, and bodily protocols through the distribution of its smallest, most mobile publications.

The ATS was the largest and perhaps best-established evangelical publisher at the start of the Civil War (more accurately, publishers: following the 1859 split between major ATS branches in Boston and New York, publications from both societies continued to appear under the name "American Tract Society"). The ATS declared itself early on "for the Union" and did not actively distribute materials in Confederate camps.⁴⁶ Nonetheless, its efforts eclipsed attempts to publish "soldiers' books" by other religious organizations, including the Christian Commission, the Presbyterian Board of Publication, and the American Bible Society. The ATS's well-documented embrace of cutting-edge printing technology enabled the organization to respond quickly to the perceived need for soldiers' print. Meanwhile, its network of paid agents, known as colporteurs, positioned the ATS to distribute print across a wide geographic area, although colporteurs faced challenges to distribution as the war progressed.⁴⁷

ATS presses began to churn out publications for soldiers within months of the war's start. Existing small-format publications were quickly recast as works for soldiers. Palm-sized, four-page pamphlets previously advertised as "envelope tracts"—tracts small and lightweight enough to be slipped into outgoing correspondence—became "soldier's pocket tracts," though with the exception of a few new titles their contents remained the same. Groups of playing-card-sized tracts distributed in sealed wrappers, meanwhile, became "neat packets adapted to the soldier's pocket."⁴⁸ The ATS also produced at least eighteen collections of books and tracts, as well as numerous standalone publications, developed with soldiers in mind.⁴⁹ Among these was the "Soldier's Pocket Library" series, which the organization launched in 1861. ATS claims regarding publication popularity can be difficult to assess; as David Paul Nord observes, colporteurs were known to exaggerate, though their reports often reveal important patterns, despite obvious biases and editorial interventions.⁵⁰ The Pocket Library, however, received early external praise. In July 27, 1861, the Hartford Daily Courant would report that the "Soldier's Pocket Library" series was "highly prized by officers and soldiers, from whom many pleasing testimonials of approbation and gratitude have been received."⁵¹ And for at least one soldier, Private Henry M. Graham, the series was worth a special request: in an October 24,1862 letter to his aunt, Graham asks for a flannel cap, wool stockings, mittens, needle book, and "if convenient…send the Soldier's Pocket Library."⁵²

Like Christian Commission libraries, the twenty-five-volume Pocket Library included a combination of short military biographies, hymn books, sermons, and other texts, and it provided colporteurs and other distributors with an easy-to-deploy system for reaching soldier-readers. In a major difference from the Christian Commission system, each volume could be purchased or distributed independently of the library set, making Pocket Library books objects that individuals could transport themselves. Each "32mo" book was approximately the size of a pack of cards, weighed no more than a slice of bread, and featured an optional "flexible" cloth binding that could bend to fit the confines of a knapsack or pocket. ATS reports state that soldiers found the "little flexible covered army books…especially acceptable," noting that the books' "weight, less than two ounces, was no inducement for [the solider] to leave [books] when on the march."⁵³

The fear that soldiers would discard their books on the march registers broader anxieties about the effects of wartime instability on solider conduct. In a sermon delivered in Grantville, Massachusetts, on April 28, 1861, Congregational minister Edward Sumner Atwood lamented that the South "has chosen to put the purse, the knapsack, and the sword, in the place of law, order, and liberty, as the controlling elements of this era."⁵⁴ Syntactically opposing "the knapsack" to "order," Atwood framed the knapsack as an object whose incitement to roam would loosen and disturb existing structures of social control. For the New York Bible Society, an auxiliary branch of the larger American Bible Society, "the unsettled position of new recruits" (emphasis original) similarly posed a "great obstacle" to attempts to encourage moral order among soldiers. "Sleeping at one spot, and eating at another, perhaps without even a knapsack to put a testament into if given, or indeed any place but his pocket or shirt bosom," the NYBS concludes it "no wonder" that soldiers are "careless" in their conduct.⁵⁵ Such fears would in turn shape NYBS format choices. In 1862, the organization announced that "we do not supply Bibles, and indeed discourage the taking of them, as a general thing, as being too heavy for the knapsack, and therefore more liable to be left behind."⁵⁶ By publishing and distributing texts in formats that offered "no inducement" to be left, evangelical organizations sought to keep soldiers in constant contact with appropriate literature.

If knapsacks reflected the breakdown of social order, the "knapsack book" offered religious and reform-minded publishers a way to reassert it. Like the NYBS, the ATS framed its small-format publications as works designed to out-circulate materials deemed harmful for soldiers. ATS leaders stated that their books and tracts "ought to take the place of thousands of dime novels that flood our camps," and expressed hopes that "the [soldier] libraries will prove very acceptable and useful to the men, and will take the place of the miserable light literature which now constitutes the principal part of their reading."⁵⁷ The claim that religious and moral works would "take the place" of light literature reflected the belief that reading religious literature would change reader tastes. Yet it also registered ATS hopes that small-format print might physically occupy precious space in soldier's knapsacks and pockets. In Society reports, ATS agents even urged their readers to send soldiers clothes prepacked with improving literature, observing that "many a soldier has found in the pockets of the garments sent to him… monitors speaking of the things which most intimately concern him."⁵⁸ Elsewhere, other evangelical print organizations took up similarly creative distribution techniques. The NYBS urged its distributors to place books in Army medicine chests, observing that "[this] is regarded as a very sure and effective means of distribution. The Bibles placed with medical stores are always preserved. The medical chest is saved in the event of disaster, though all else be lost."⁵⁹ Such circulation strategies literalize reformer arguments that "suitable" reading was military equipment—something that should, as a Bible Society agent writes, "be added to the stores of a soldier's knapsack."⁶⁰

Formatted to Infiltrate

For the ATS, the material unobtrusiveness of pocket-sized books amplified their perceived ability to initiate behavioral change among military readers. In a trope that repeats across the ATS's wartime reports, the sudden appearance of a "good book"—including the "little flexible-covered books" of the Soldier's Pocket Library—purportedly enables ATS texts to infiltrate groups of gambling soldiers.⁶¹ As books replace cards, the soldiers apologize for their actions, attributing their idleness to a lack of reading material. "I never play cards at home, but I have nothing to read and nothing to do very much of the time," one soldier tells an Army Chaplain. "Give us good reading-matter," says another, "Unless we have something to read, we must have our games of cards."⁶² As with much writing in ATS annual reports, such scenes function as fundraising literature, framing the supply of appropriate reading material as an urgent need for the war effort. At the same time, these passages illustrate how the ATS hoped pocket-sized books might infiltrate presumed sites of soldier degradation.

Camp card-playing scenes in particular suggest that ATS agents sought to exploit the physical resemblance of small-format print and standard playing cards in order to connect reluctant soldier-readers with religious texts. In a speech reprinted in the ATS's 1864 annual report, the Rev. C. P. Lyford describes happening across "two men gambling" while walking through a convalescent camp. He is accompanied by a colleague, who

wanted to see if the game could not be stopped with reading-matter. I happened to have a package of cards with passages of Scripture printed upon them, and as [the men] were engaged in the game, I crept up behind them, and as each one laid down his card I took one of the Scripture cards and laid it down upon his. They looked up at me, and I said, "My friends, I shall claim that hand, for I played the best card."⁶³

An ATS catalog from 1861 describes scripture cards as works of "convenient size for the pocket, attractive in appearance" and printed "on stiff enameled paper, each containing a verse of scripture."⁶⁴ In general, scripture cards produced during the nineteenth century bore close enough physical resemblance to playing cards that a colporteur might realistically hope to evade initial detection among cardplayers until he had finished delivering his materials. A palm-sized scripture card from 1850 (figure 3c) features biblical citations surrounded by colored engravings; with its ruled borders, thick cardstock, and dimensions, the card evokes standard playing cards of the period (figure 3d). Another set of scripture cards produced in nineteenth-century Philadelphia features Bible verses and hymn quotes on thumb-sized cards; distributed in a pack, the cards (figure 3b) are nearly identical in size to a set of "domino cards" produced by the Singer Machine company "for free distribution to U.S. soldiers" in 1865 (figure 3a).

The scripture card bait-and-switch showcases how formats may function by disappointing as well as fulfilling user expectations. In a modern parallel, tract organizations today publish "money tracts": small rectangular sheets printed on one side to look like enticing high-value bills and printed on the other side with a short text.⁶⁵ Like money tracts, nineteenth-century scripture cards and small tracts align shared cultural understandings of a particular format (such as a playing-card-shaped piece of paper) with anticipated practices and behaviors (such as picking up or looking down at cards on the gambling table). As deployed by the ATS, scripture cards promised to convey a moralizing message through their format as well as content: the cards' resemblance to playing cards stages an experience that moves gamblers through the activation of greed or desire to the realization that said desire is the source of their deception.

In Lyford's account, the scripture cards open the way to a conversation that ends with soldiers exchanging their cards for tracts. Other versions of this scene that appear beyond ATS literature testify to widespread use of pocket-sized print's deceptive material qualities. In a scene that takes place in Confederate camp—that is, a site outside ATS colporteurs' range—the Rev. R. W. Cridlin describes entering a tent in which soldiers are playing cards and asking the men

"if I could take a hand." Waiting for my turn, I first threw down "Evils of Gaming"; then "Mother's Parting Words to her Soldier Boy." I found that the game was mine. At the sight of the word mother, the tears rolled down their cheeks as they both exclaimed: "Parson, I will never play cards again!"⁶⁶

(emphasis original)

At first glance, this conversion scene appears to hinge on soldiers reading: the "sight of the word mother" moves the men to tears. Yet like the previous

Figure 3a-d (l to r).

a) Singer domino cards and case (New York: Singer Manufacturing Company, 1865), 4 × 6 cm, American Antiquarian Society; b) Bible verse on individual cards (Philadelphia: s.n., 1875), 5 × 8 cm, American Antiquarian Society; c) Scripture card (Worcester, MA: A. G. Beaman, 1850), 10 × 7 cm, American Antiquarian Society; d) Card from "National emblems, a set of Civil War playing cards" (New York: American Card Company, c 1862), 9 × 6.3 cm, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Images 3a-c courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

scene, the drama of Cridlin pretending that he is "tak[ing] a hand" and then "[throwing] down" on the gambling table depends for its effect on the shape and size of his tracts, which readers would likely have imagined as small enough to interleave in a hand of cards or to hide up a sleeve. Here again it is the tracts' format that enables their content to reach their intended audience—their small, concealable size that affects their perceived power to incite behavioral change.

Missionary propaganda and social reality certainly did not always converge. The gamblers' apparent eagerness to get hold of religious texts may reflect the fact that soldiers valued evangelical print artifacts for reasons that could be far from spiritual. Soldiers complained that "the newspapers are so high-priced, that we can't afford to buy them," while religious print could often be obtained for free.⁶⁷ It could also be repurposed. In a report published by the NYBS in 1862, an author laments that "the Testament we give is sometimes sold by the irreligious soldier without money, and amid the temptations of the city, for tobacco and drink." The author goes on to insist that "we have the right to look upon the book not as having finished its course, but only as removed to another field."⁶⁸ Yet the NYBS and other evangelical organizations could not deny that religious print designed to occupy soldiers' pockets could also be converted into the very "temptations" such works were meant to combat.

"Tales of the Pocket" and Reading for Good Soldiership

Card-playing scenes highlight the potential of small print formats to occupy and redirect soldier attention. Elsewhere, wartime authors of moral and religious texts suggest that the experience of reading pocket-sized books might improve men's capacity to serve as soldiers in the first place. In the American Temperance Union text "Tales of the Pocket," a small tract guards a soldier from the dangers of alcohol both by occupying his pocket in place of a bottle and by structuring the soldier's practice of regular, frequent reading. Recalling military drillmasters like Colonel DeWitt Clinton Baxter, who sought to "habituate the men…to act with promptness," the anonymous author of "Tales" suggests that the gestures, postures, and habits associated with pocket-sized books might likewise help discipline readers for good soldiership.⁶⁹

"Tales" is conceived as a fictional interview between bottle, tract, and an anonymous interlocutor, and it concerns the pockets of two men. One is a "drunkard," found carrying a bottle of rum; the other is a soldier, reportedly discovered by Sanitary Commission organizer Elisha Harris on the Antietam battlefield with the ATS temperance tract "Putnam and the Wolf" in his pocket. Throughout the text, the tract emerges as an aid to order, while the concealed bottle proclaims itself an agent of anarchy. Although the "drunkard" is a civilian, his bottle's self-professed ability to "elude the most eagle-eyed government" gestures toward wartime concerns about alcohol's effects on the Union military.⁷⁰ Excessive alcohol use was widely viewed as a threat to soldiers' self-control and ability to carry out their duties. As Scott C. Martin notes, approximately eighteen percent of military general courts martial in the Union Army originated in alcohol-based incidents.⁷¹

In contrast to the bottle, the pocketed tract promises to keep its owner occupied with religious reading. "When [the soldier] was weary, and exhausted, and enticed by wicked companions to drink," the tract recalls, "he would go by himself, sit down, and take me from his pocket, and read my words; and then, rising and shaking himself, go back, and nothing could move him."⁷² The claim that handling pocket-sized books could strengthen soldiers' self-discipline echoes wartime advertisements for materials including the ATS Soldier's Pocket Library. As a colporteur states in an 1865 report, Pocket Library books "have an immediate effect on the soldiers, causing them to love to be private, redeeming all the time they can for meditation."⁷³ The small books "became very popular," adds another colporteur in the same report, "as the soldier could at any time put the book in his pocket, and resume the reading when opportunity offered."⁷⁴ The ready presence of pocket-sized books, such accounts propose, encouraged individual soldiers to contemplate and re-read, contrasting the "desultory" reading that reformers associated with the reading of light literature.⁷⁵

In "Tales," the attentive rereading encouraged by the pocket tract's presence also evokes prayer—another act that depends on the regular repetition of texts and gestures. Members of religions including Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity have long published religious texts in the smallest formats for ritual or devotional use.⁷⁶ The regular, intermittent reading practices that nineteenth-century religious authors associated with pocket-sized books, however, suggest that small formats may also possess the ability to turn all reading into devotional reading. When ATS agents suggest that works in the Soldiers Pocket Library encourage soldiers to find time for "meditation," for instance, they do not single out collections of prayers over military biographies. If format alters audience perceptions of genre, as scholars such as McGill and Jordan Stein have shown, responses to pocket-sized books underscore that genre is not just a matter of expectation but of user performance.⁷⁷

According to many nineteenth-century reformers, prayer and religious reading could render soldiers more receptive to military discipline. Rev. Joshua Butts, chaplain of the 47th New York Infantry, reported that soldiers who received pocket Testaments "are more moral, more respectful to their officers, and far more easily managed in every way, and consequently better soldiers than those refusing to receive them" (emphasis original).⁷⁸ Similarly, in an 1862 address to the ATS, the sailor-turned-minister Charles J. Jones reports that "the tracts published by your Society have a tendency, not only to make men Christians and better men on board ship, but to nerve them for deeds of daring, and prepare them for positions of usefulness" (emphasis original).⁷⁹ Jones's words echo reformer claims that moral and religious texts would teach respect for authority and in general make enlisted men more compliant. His speech also presents ATS tracts as performance-enhancing aids. Like Union officers who promoted the habit of coffee-drinking to increase soldier alertness—with Gen. Benjamin Butler even planning attack times around soldier caffeination levels—Jones argues for reading as a camp activity whose effects will be felt on the battlefield.⁸⁰

In "Tales of the Pocket," the author emphasizes that not just the texts but the material form of ATS publications might aid soldier discipline. The temperance tract as material object enables the "Tales" soldier to control his body and its appetites. Drawn and re-drawn from the soldier's pocket, the tract teaches a repertoire of gestures and poses that exceed the "pedagogy of physical stillness" historically associated with print literacy.⁸¹ Indeed, "Tales" suggests that temperance is as much a physical performance as it is a matter of will, gesturing toward the American temperance movement's broader reliance on public spectacle and the enactment of what Thomas Augst has called "ritual script[s]."⁸² Sized for easy carrying, the tract makes a ready prop in the soldier's performance of temperance, moving with him as he "go[es]," "sit[s]," "read[s]," and "ris[es] and shak[es]" in his refusal to drink alcohol. While the temperance tract's content aids the soldier's resolve not to drink, the author of "Tales" shows that the tract's effects on the soldier depend equally on the material ritual that the small artifact anchors.

In depicting the tract itself as a protective object, the author of "Tales" also gestures to wartime associations between small books and armor. Popular accounts of "book shields" appeared frequently in wartime newspapers and encouraged readers to imagine books as talismans that could ward off or stop bullets by virtue of their presence in a pocket.⁸³ Evangelical publishers active during the war also regularly promoted such narratives. As John Fea notes, the American Bible Society claimed that a bible could provide "spiritual solace…as long as it was somehow connected to one's body during the thick of battle."⁸⁴

In "Tales of the Pocket," the soldier dies on the battlefield despite the tract in his pocket, "writhing in his agony" after refusing the "whiskey bottle…brought for his relief."⁸⁵ The "book-shield" trope's curious absence, however, makes visible another perceived disciplining effect of works for the soldier's pocket. As the author asks the "patriotic soldier" at the tale's conclusion: "which do you carry in your knapsack, the tract or the bottle?… Which should you rather have found in your pocket by your friends, as they come mournfully to gather up your remains and carry them to the old family tomb."⁸⁶ The scene, versions of which repeat across wartime temperance and religious writing, attempts to discourage behaviors, including drinking, by seeding anxiety that soldiers could be found dead carrying something shameful. In times of war, the pocket was no longer a private site. An illustration that frequently circulated alongside the tale dramatizes the author's point, showing Harris holding the tract over the dead soldier's prostrate body (figure 4).

Figure 4.

Title illustration from "Tales of the Pocket," in Temperance Tracts (New York: National Temperance Society, 1867), 1.

As a text published by the American Temperance Union, "Tales" is a reminder that reformer and missionary uses of pocket-sized books served organizational goals that existed prior to the war. At the same time, the final scene of "Tales" registers perhaps the most concrete way small books aided military systematization efforts: by functioning as identification documents.⁸⁷ Regular use of books to identify bodies in hospital and on battlefields influenced wartime publishers in turn: print materials ranging from bookplates issued by the Maryland Bible Society to The Soldier's Book: A Pocket Diary for Accounts and Memoranda (1862) feature blanks that prompt soldiers to treat their books as unique identifiers. The Soldier's Book, in particular, underscores Lisa Long's argument that the Civil War led to "a new precision between bodies and texts," spurred on by the influence of the Sanitary Commission.⁸⁸ Personally endorsed by Sanitary Commission President Henry Whitney Bellows, the Soldier's Book features preprinted blanks that instructed soldiers to record their "Height," "Color of Eyes," "Complexion," and "Age at the time on Enlistment," as well as "the name of town, county, and state, where you belong, with the names of your relatives or friend."⁸⁹ Wartime uses of pocket-sized books thus promised to regulate the chaos produced on the battlefield itself as well as the behaviors of individual soldiers. Even a yellow-covered novel, in the end, could be turned toward order-making purposes if inscribed with a soldier's name.

The Army as "School"

This article has so far demonstrated how major nineteenth-century American religious and reform organizations deployed pocket-sized books in their efforts to manage the habits and behaviors of white Union soldiers. While some of these interventions sought physical effects, such reducing soldiers' desire to drink, they also aimed to instill mental discipline through practices such as attentive rereading. Yet these same organizations responded much differently to the reading activities of two other prominent military and military-adjacent groups: Black soldiers, who in 1863 officially joined the Union Army in combat roles, and formerly enslaved people who self-emancipated by living and working in Union camps. As has been well-documented, Black regiments themselves sustained active reading communities, including through their engagement with the Christian Recorder and other publications of the Black press.⁹⁰ For the ATS and many white military officials, however, the primary goal of supplying reading material to Black readers in Union camps was to improve Black people's capacity for labor rather than to build sustained habits of reading.

With Black readers in mind, the ATS produced both a "tracts for freedmen" series as well as two periodicals, The Freedman's Journal and The Freedman; for Colored Children.⁹¹ The organization viewed these materials as books that, like those in the soldier's series, offered tangible tools to combat user behaviors perceived as undesirable. Recalling their worries about white soldiers' idle hands, ATS leaders declared that

surely it would be both sad and fatal if, when the dark-browed children of Ethiopia are coming up from bondage by hundreds of thousands, and stretching forth their hands unto God, we as his appointed instruments should not hasten to fill those eager hands with leaves from the tree of life.⁹²

Without print in their hands, the author of this passage suggests, formerly enslaved people might fall prey to "fatal" habits. The ATS worried that white soldiers were also vulnerable to the "temptations" and "ennui of idleness," which could be "defended" against by "book, tract, or paper placed in the hand of the soldier."⁹³ Yet while colporteurs stated that "hours of leisure" might bring on idleness in white soldiers, they assumed idleness as a default state for formerly enslaved people, claiming that the shock of "personal freedom from slavery…will sink [formerly enslaved people] into idleness and vice."⁹⁴ Such statements make painfully visible the racialized nature of dominant nineteenth-century white attitudes toward idleness. As Saidiya Hartman elaborates, the "pressing issue" of emancipation "was not simply whether ex-slaves would work, but whether they could be transformed into a rational, docile, and productive working class."⁹⁵

In the eyes of the ATS as well as the US military, teaching Black people living in Union camps to handle and read print promised to produce a "docile" Black workforce. Colonel Charles Frances Adams, Jr., writing to his father on November 2, 1864, "hope[d] to see the Army become for the black race, a school of skilled labor and of self reliance as well as an engine of war."⁹⁶ Here again, however, dominant narratives and historical reality diverge: although groups including the ATS and the US Christian Commission did establish and run camp schools, Black Southern educators also self-organized schools well before Northern involvement. And as Christopher Hager has shown, literacy rates were higher among the Southern enslaved population than many white Northerners assumed.⁹⁷ Currently available data suggests that five to ten percent of the enslaved population and from ten to more than sixty percent (depending on regiment) of Black men serving in the US military could read and write.⁹⁸ Nonetheless, many white officers claimed that low literacy levels in Black regiments created administrative problems for the Army and viewed teaching men to read as necessary for ensuring group efficacy.⁹⁹

At times, white officers' desire to promote literacy led to extreme measures. In October 1864, Lieutenant Colonel David Branson, a commanding officer of the 62nd US Colored Infantry, issued a general order stating that

when any soldier of this command is found to be, or to have been, playing cards, he will be placed, standing, in some prominent position in the camp with book in hand, and required then and there to learn a considerable lesson in reading and spelling: and if unwilling to learn, he will be compelled by hunger to do so…No freed slave who cannot read well has a right to waste the time and opportunity here given to him to fit himself for the position of a free citizen.¹⁰⁰

Branson's insistence that "book" must replace "cards" in soldiers' hands echoes earlier ATS worries about soldier behavior. Yet his framing of reading as a punishment that requires soldiers to "be placed, standing" in public recenters this disciplinary fantasy on the Black soldier's body rather than the white soldier's mental ability to resist temptation.

Branson's order thus anticipates later ATS texts aimed at Black readers that present reading as a regimented activity requiring proper bodily comportment. A list of "general rules for reading" in The Freedman's Third Reader (1866) informs readers to "hold the book in your left hand, avoid stooping forward, keep the shoulders back, and the chest full and round."¹⁰¹ As Hartman has shown, ATS manuals for formerly enslaved people consistently represented freedom and "self-mastery" in terms of control over one's body.¹⁰² Indeed, the link between reading and upright posture that both Branson and the ATS establish reflects the belief, popular among white US officers and in the white Northern press, that newly emancipated men must be "taught to feel and to act…The plantation manners, the awkward bowing…must be exchanged for the upright form…He must be shown how to stand and step."¹⁰³ While formerly enslaved authors including Frederick Douglass represented learning to read as an act of rebellion, Branson here recasts learning to read as a debt that must be paid in exchange for soldier freedom, reinforcing broader nineteenth-century narratives that framed freedom for the formerly enslaved as a "mortgaged" state.¹⁰⁴ In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass represents the "copy of Webster's spelling book in my pocket" as a potent—and concealable—sign of personal agency.¹⁰⁵ For Branson, by contrast, to hold portable "book in hand" works to "fit" Black readers to rigid physical scripts in a public setting, disciplining individual bodies for the army machine.

That both Branson and the ATS reference "books" in their discussions belies the limited access to books that Black regiments and camp schools actually experienced. This shortage gestures toward larger inequities that shaped Black soldiers' reading experiences throughout the war. Soldiers themselves were eager for books to own, not just material to read: Rev. Henry Turner, an AME minister who served as chaplain for the 1st US Colored Troops, reports in 1864 that while he "weekly procure[d] for those who can read" "thousands of papers, tracts, and periodicals," soldiers nonetheless clamored for personal copies of "a hymn book, a Testament, a Bible."¹⁰⁶ Yet although as Rev. Thomas Callahan would report from a Louisiana "freedmen's camp," "their cry is for 'Books! Books!'", the Freedmen's Aid Commission (1863–1864) preferred to sell school books in camp schools rather than provide free copies.¹⁰⁷ "It is thought better to teach the men to spend a part of their money judiciously in buying books &c. than to give books to them," writes Chaplain John R. Reasoner in a November 30, 1865 letter to the Adjutant General of the Army.¹⁰⁸ Book ownership, Reasoner proposed, was a privilege that must be earned.

By the nineteenth century, as Joseph Rezek has demonstrated, print as a medium trailed ever-hardening associations with white supremacy.¹⁰⁹ Ideologies of racial hierarchy also extended to format-defined categories of print. The ATS, for instance, did not actively promote or distribute its Soldier's Pocket Library to Black regiments, preferring instead to give out more ephemeral periodicals and tracts. Indeed, as Sonia Hazard has shown, the ATS hoped to eventually graduate all white Americans from simple paper tracts to bound books, which the organization considered a "superior media format" for "superior persons."¹¹⁰ Such differences underscore that in projecting audience and use, format choices can also racialize, grafting racial meaning onto categories of print.

Perhaps this is why, when Black residents of Baltimore commissioned a Bible to gift Abraham Lincoln in commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation, they elected to publish a tabletop-sized "imperial quarto"—the largest format then manufactured by the American Bible Society. Described by newspapers as "the costliest" and "the most magnificent Bible ever manufactured in this country," the book known today as the "Lincoln Bible" features an elaborate gold and velvet binding.¹¹¹ Over 500 people contributed toward the $580 purchase cost.¹¹² At a moment when the average novel cost $1, the Lincoln Bible visibly refuted accusations of Black idleness and indigence. Before the group of Baltimoreans formally presented the Bible to Lincoln, they also displayed the book in Baltimore for several months. From July to September 1864, the Bible lay on public view at Baltimore's "Bible House" with a sign indicating it as a gift for the president.¹¹³ The Bible House was the storefront of the Maryland Bible Society, which supplied soldiers with Testaments throughout the war. In contrast to the small Maryland Bible Society Testaments stored nearby, ready to be stowed in white soldiers' pockets, the format of the Lincoln Bible spoke of the collective rather than the individual. Like the AME Church-sponsored Christian Recorder newspaper, which appeared on what its editors describe as "mammoth sheet[s]," the imperial quarto emphatically took up space.¹¹⁴ As an object, the book asserted nineteenth-century Black Americans' unyielding presence in Baltimore, a city of only tenuous loyalty to the Union—and sent an unmissable message that its backers were canny users of print, whatever the US government and organizations like the ATS might maintain.

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Like very large books, pocket-sized books tend to prove the exception to the claim that formats are, as McGill writes, typically "designed to go unnoticed by the reader."¹¹⁵ Books that explicitly invite carrying, whether through titles or other paratextual framing, encourage attention to their material form as well as the practices of use they prompt. This article has attempted to show that Civil War-era hopes and anxieties about pocket-sized books reflect the format category's material specificity, even when publisher projections about use at times departed from the realities of soldier reading. In attending to the ways formats anticipate material practices, I have also worked to highlight ways that nineteenth-century Americans used books for purposes beyond reading, including by treating small books as talismans and military ID cards.

Compared to more familiar biopolitical mechanisms of nineteenth-century American life, such as schools or the military itself, pocket-sized books wield less obvious power. Indeed, as accounts of soldiers reselling books to buy "tobacco and drink" illustrate, portable objects make unreliable tools for exerting biopower in the first place. At the same time, the pocket-sized book's perceived ability to maximize the effects of religious texts on soldier-readers held strong appeal for nineteenth-century evangelical and reform organizations. Civil War-era publishers certainly deployed small-print formats for practical reasons, including ease of transport. Yet wartime fantasies about books designed for carrying in the pocket also demonstrate the granularity with which organizations such as the ATS sought to control Union soldiers' bodies and lives, down to the very objects they carried in a pocket. As objects believed to wield intimate influence over readers' habits, pocket-sized books encouraged nineteenth-century commentators to imagine newly detailed ways of managing the health and conduct of large-scale populations—and to speculate how the right pairing of text and material form might bridge the gap between reading and doing.