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Missionary memoirs and biographies (often full of illustrations like the one to the left) gained huge popularity during the 19th century, inspiring young people to become missionaries and motivating Christians at home to pray for and give money to the missions cause. One biography of Adoniram Judson, published in 1853 by Francis Wayland, sold 26,000 copies in the first year alone. The most famous biography of Ann Judson appeared in a new edition almost every year from 1830 to 1856. Unitarian Lydia Maria Child described it as "a book so universally known that it scarcely need be mentioned." To the present, there have been at least 56 biographies of Adoniram published and at least 16 of Ann, including biographies for children. Though over the years the facts grew more and more embellished, the stories surrounding the Judsons' lives became as much a part of the landscape of American missions as the Judsons' own accomplishments.

He made only a handful of converts in five years of evangelizing among the Native Americans. He died of tuberculosis at age 29. But for 19th-century Christians, David Brainerd (1718-1747) was the ideal missionary and a model of "disinterested benevolence," the sacrificing of self for the sake of others. Jonathan Edwards's 1749 biography, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, became a spiritual classic motivating countless young Americans to become missionaries themselves. Levi Parsons, a missionary in Palestine, wrote, "Much refreshed this day by perusing the life of Brainerd. How completely devoted to God, how ardent his affections. What thirst after holiness, what love for souls. His life was short but brilliant and useful. … Counting pain and distress and every bodily infirmity dross, he patiently encountered difficulties and dangers, and at last sweetly resigned his all to his savior."

By the 1830s, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) prohibited unmarried persons from entering the mission field. The Board believed that married missionaries could cope better with hardships and resist sexual temptations. Thus they required young men to be engaged at least two months before entering the mission field. To help the would-be missionaries find wives, the ABCFM had an ongoing list of "missionary-minded" women who were considered "young, pious, educated, fit and reasonably good-looking." Often these missionary couples would leave for foreign lands within a week after their marriage.

From 1820 to 1840, an estimated 590 American missionaries scattered throughout the world—reaching such widespread fields as India, Burma, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), China, Siam (Thailand), Borneo, Singapore, Ceylon, Persia, Turkey, Palestine, Greece, Southern and Western Africa, Brazil, and more.

Though the Judsons barely knew each other when they got engaged, their marriage was extraordinarily loving and committed. Ann wrote to her sister while en route to India: "I find Mr. Judson one of the kindest, most faithful, and affectionate of husbands. His conversation frequently dissipates the gloomy clouds of spiritual darkness which hang over my mind, and brightens my hope of a happy eternity." After Ann finally succumbed to disease, Adoniram wrote, "There lies, enclosed in a coffin, the form of her I so much loved—the wife of my youth, the source and centre of my domestic happiness." Her death, he said, "deprived me of one of the first of women, the best of wives."

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