Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830}}}1880 [Hardcover]

This book places religious debates about slavery at the centre of American political culture before, during and after the Civil War.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.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.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 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, 182935; 2. Heresy and schism: the uneasy gradualist-proslavery ecclesiastical alliance, 183645; 3. The limits of Christian conservative antislavery: white supremacy and the failure of emancipationism, 184559; 4. The abolitionist threat: religious orthodoxy and proslavery unionism on tl“Û