It would be difficult, if not impossible, to argue that there was a single written text more important to the development of British colonial America than the Bible. The Bible's initial importance in the colonies is primarily evident in the Northeast, where large populations of Puritans settled. The Puritans centered their religious beliefs on the Bible, taking it to be the standard by which they guided their private, social, and political worlds. So central was the Bible that as early as 1642, the colony of Massachusetts Bay put a law in place commanding that all children be taught to read. The Puritan commitment to the Bible inspired this law, for if the Bible was the standard by which one was to live one's life, one needed to be able to read it. New England would remain a stronghold for biblical literacy for more than two centuries. Other parts of the country would also have strong ties to the Bible, but in early American culture such ties grew weaker the farther one traveled either west or south from New England.
It should be no surprise that with the Bible so closely tied to American literacy and education, much of American literature has been deeply inflected with biblical resonances. The famous politician and orator Edward Everett (1794-1865) argued for the existence of a uniquely American literature in the early nineteenth century by pointing to the vast American corpus of religious writings. Whether these were sermons, poems, or histories, they were all rooted in the biblical text. The writings of such early American authors as Timothy Dwight (17521817), Catherine Sedgwick (1789-1867), James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), and Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) were all inflected with the biblical narrative.
The Bible served as much more than simply a literary inspiration in early American culture. It functioned as kind of a cultural anchor—a text so well-known by so many Americans that it provided a common set of ideas, characters, and narrative conventions—well beyond the field of literature, as seen in its ubiquitous presence in American education, law, and politics. Many political debates are rooted in various views of the biblical narrative. Among others, the Bible influenced the debates over slavery, monogamy, qualifications to hold political office, temperance reform, and divorce. The Bible has also significantly influenced the rhetoric of political debate in the United States. Founders of the new American Republic such as John Witherspoon (17231794), Elias Boudinot (1740-1821), and Richard Stockton (1730-1781), as well as the subsequent president, John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) frequently invoked biblical references in their political rhetoric.
While various biblical interpretations and uses of the Bible have long exercised a profound influence on differing segments of the country's national, regional, and local life, it is critical to understand that, along with diverse biblical usage, there has also been diverse biblical production. The King James translation of the Bible was held under royal copyright until 1776, when the American colonies formally separated from Britain. Subsequently, American publishers began to produce their own editions of the Bible. Between 1776 and 1830 over seven hundred different editions of the Bible were printed on American presses.
While press runs of two thousand copies characterized American Bible production in the late eighteenth century, by the 1820s print runs of fifty thousand copies had become possible. Leading the way in this new era of Bible mass production was the American Bible Society, an interdenominational enterprise located in New York City. Changes in printing technology, papermaking, stereotyping, and distribution allowed the American Bible Society to begin publishing more than 300,000 copies of the Bible per year in the late 1820s. In 1829 the American Bible Society set for itself the goal of providing every American household with a Bible within a span of three years. This goal was never reached, but that the Society believed it possible and important enough to pursue this goal says volumes about both the advances in American publishing and the importance of the Bible in early American culture.
As different American Bible editions appeared, it is critical to note that they had varied formats, illustrations, appended material, and perhaps most important, translation work. Beginning with Charles Thomson's impressive translation of the Septuagint version of the Bible in 1808, six American translators would by 1830 provide their compatriots with portions of the Scriptures, often inflecting God's word with pronounced denominational and theological biases. These different translations have often exercised a profound influence over how the core biblical text is interpreted, spawning new social movements and religious traditions such as Unitarianism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism).
Over half a dozen publishers had produced some fifteen Catholic Bible editions by 1830. Bibles could also be found in a number of different European, as well as Native American languages such as Cherokee, Mohawk, and Delaware in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. The United States may have long held the Bible as its most central text, but it is a text of infinite complexity both in terms of its core narrative, and how that narrative reached millions of early Americans.