American Historical Ephemera and Photography Featuring the Civil War and American Militaria Collection of Bruce B. Hermann

The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Nashville, TN: Tennessee Bible Society, 1861.

32mo. (Toned, spotting especially to endpapers.) Original brown cloth-backed boards (losses to spine, dampstains, wear to extremities).

Provenance: W.J. Hill (ownership inscription). Pencil inscription to front flyleaf: "W.J. Hill / Camp Hunter Suffolk Va / Cobbs Ga. Legion / March 13th. 1862." An additional ink inscription to the front board reads: "Found in the Rebel / Quartermasters Dep't. / Petersburg Va., April 20th/65."

William J. Hill enlisted as a private and served in Company E (Poythress Volunteers, recruited from Burke County, GA ) in the Infantry battalion of Cobb's Legion. Originally, the legion was composed of infantry, artillery, and cavalry components with an integrated command. The organization was abandoned in the autumn of 1862 as impracticable in the Civil War field. The inscription made by Hill was made shortly before their first major engagements at Yorktown and Lee's Mill. They would go on to see many of the major battles of the Eastern Theater including Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Chattanooga, Siege of Knoxville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg where this small Bible was captured by an unidentified Union soldier. The infantry battalion would remain in service to the close of the war, present at Appomattox. 

An early Confederate printing of the New Testament was published and distributed by the Tennessee Bible Society, an organization founded shortly after the war for the purpose of supplying soldiers with Bibles. A copy at the Museum of the Bible (BIB.003333) includes the inscriptions of two Confederate chaplains and is bound in full cloth. The spine cloth of the copy offered here features the same embossed design, a possible indication that the full cloth copies were reserved for chaplains and paper board copies were distributed to enlisted men.