"Beecher's Bibles" was the name given to the breech loading Sharps rifles that were supplied to the anti-slavery immigrants in Kansas.
The name came from the eminent New England minister Henry Ward Beecher, of the New England Emigrant Aid Society, of whom it was written in a February 8, 1856, article in the New York Tribune:
Additionally, the arms were often shipped in wooden crates marked "Bibles" or "books." They were intended for the conflicts fought over slavery in the Kansas Territory leading up to its induction into statehood. As decreed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the issue of slavery in the new state was to be determined by popular sovereignty, thus unleashing a wave of bloody violence between pro- and anti-slavery forces throughout Kansas. The Beecher family were some of the foremost abolitionists in the country; Henry Ward's sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, had in 1852 written the abolitionist classic Uncle Tom's Cabin.