Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880 Cambridge Studies on the American South Series

This book sheds new light on the role of religion in the nineteenth-century slavery debates. Luke E. Harlow argues that the ongoing conflict over the meaning of Christian 'orthodoxy' constrained the political and cultural horizons available for defenders and opponents of American slavery. The central locus of these debates was Kentucky, a border slave state with a long-standing antislavery presence. Although white Kentuckians famously cast themselves as moderates in the period and remained with the Union during the Civil War, their religious values showed no moderation on the slavery question. When the war ultimately brought emancipation, white Kentuckians found themselves in lockstep with the rest of the Confederate South. Racist religion thus paved the way for the making of Kentucky's Confederate memory of the war, as well as a deeply entrenched white Democratic Party in the state.

Introduction; 1. The challenge of immediate emancipationism: the origins of abolitionist heresy, 1829–35; 2. Heresy and schism: the uneasy gradualist-proslavery ecclesiastical alliance, 1836–45; 3. The limits of Christian conservative antislavery: white supremacy and the failure of emancipationism, 1845–59; 4. The abolitionist threat: religious orthodoxy and proslavery unionism on the eve of civil war, 1859–61; 5. Competing visions of political theology: Kentucky Presbyterianism's civil war, 1861–2; 6. The end of neutrality: emancipation, political religion, and the triumph of abolitionist heterodoxy, 1862–5; 7. Kentucky's redemption: confederate religion and white democratic domination, 1865–74; Epilogue: the antebellum past for the postwar future.

Luke E. Harlow is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His published work has appeared in Slavery and Abolition, Ohio Valley History and the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. He is the co-editor of Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present.