Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830ÔÇô1880 (Cambridge Studies on the American South)
Cambridge University Press, 6/26/2014
EAN 9781107000896, ISBN10: 1107000890
Hardcover, 258 pages, 23.1 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
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.