With the disestablishment of religion by the early nineteenth century, American Protestants began to turn to a number of benevolent societies in order to help ensure the virtue and Christian character of the nation. Many of these societies were involved in publishing. Organizations such as the American Bible Society (1816), the American Sunday School Union (1824) and the American Tract Society (1825) spearheaded a print revolution in the United States as they used the latest publishing technology to flood the nation with Christian literature.

By the late 1820s, the American Tract Society was distributing five million pages of printed material annually, making its material among the most widely circulated and familiar literature of the country's antebellum period. The majority of tracts from the Society were four to sixteen pages in length, but the Society also printed longer works, such as editions of the New Testament, Richard Baxter's Call to the Unconverted and annual releases of its immensely popular Christian Almanac. The Society used a vast system of volunteers and colporteurs— paid traveling agents— to distribute its literature.

The first article of the American Tract Society's Constitution stated that the Society's goal was “to diffuse a knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ as the redeemer of sinners, and to promote the interests of vital godliness and sound morality, by the circulation of Religious Tracts, calculated to receive the approbation of all Evangelical Christians.” In order to obtain this Evangelical approbation, the Society attempted to avoid all sectarianism, whether it be theological or political. For example, before the Civil War the Society took pains to avoid publishing inflammatory literature on slavery. The Society constantly worked to produce material that would encourage the participation of the broadest possible Protestant coalition. Thus, while much of its material came from British authors, the literature of the American Tract Society offers a revealing look into the mainstream intellectual currents of nineteenth- century American Protestantism. And, although in its early years it stood against the novel, the millions of moral tales that it distributed in tract form, such as “The Forgiving African,” helped set the stage for the popularity of religious fiction in the United States.