Religion, race, and the making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880
By: Luke E. Harlow, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Series: Cambridge studies on the American South
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
ISBN-13: 9781107000896
Subjects: Antislavery movements; Abolitionists; History; Christianity and politics
Description: This book sheds new light on the role of religion in the nineteenth-century slavery debates. In it, Luke E. Harlow argues that ongoing conflict over the meaning of Christian "orthodoxy" constrained the political and cultural horizons available for defenders and opponents of American slavery. The central focus 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. (Publisher).
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-232) and index.
Table of contents: title: The challenge of immediate emancipationism, the origins of abolitionist heresy, 1829-1835; title: Heresy and schism: the uneasy gradualist-proslavery ecclesiastical alliance, 1836-1845; title: The limits of Christian conservative antislavery: white supremacy and the failure of emancipationism, 1845-1859; title: The abolitionist threat: religious orthodoxy and proslavery unionism on the eve of Civil War, 1859-1861; title: Competing visions of political theology: Kentucky Presbyterianism's Civil War, 1861-1862; title: The end of neutrality: emancipation, political religion, and the triumph of abolitionist heterodoxy, 1862-1865; title: Kentucky's redemption: Confederate religion and white democratic domination, 1865-1874; title: Epilogue: the antebellum past for the postwar future.