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Henry Ward Beecher, abolitionist and rifleman
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was a Congregationalist clergyman and a prominent abolitionist. He and his church shipped so many Sharps rifles to anti-slavery settlers in Kansas that the Sharp rifles became known as "Beecher's bibles" and his church as the "Church of the Holy Rifle."
He was a rifleman, no doubt. I own his copy of Cadamus Wilcox's book, Rifles and Rifle Practice." I just located a book he coauthored, a sort of spiritual self-help book, "Life Thoughts" (1858). In it he reflect, "True aiming, in life, is like true aiming in marksmanship. We always look at the fore-sight of a rifle through the hind-sight."
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In 1856 Beecher was quoted by the New York Tribune as saying that "the Sharps rifle was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of these instruments, so far as the slave-holders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles."