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  • Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 by Luke Harlow
  • A. Glenn Crothers
Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880. Luke Harlow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-1070-0089-6, 258 pp., cloth, $90.00.

Luke Harlow’s Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky joins a growing number of distinguished studies that explore the role of religious belief in shaping the nineteenth century contest over slavery. Equally notable, Harlow situates his study in oft-neglected Kentucky, arguing that the slavery debate in the Bluegrass State enables historians “to understand the American struggle over slavery and abolition more broadly” (1). In Kentucky, Harlow argues, evangelical conservative emancipationists, proslavery whites, and abolitionists debated the morality of slavery and white supremacy, using—they all claimed—the Bible as their guide. The apparent sharp differences between antislavery conservatives and slavery’s supporters, he maintains, eroded during the 1850s and 1860s because at root they shared a belief in the divinely ordained nature of bondage and white supremacy and viewed abolitionists as heretics who rejected their insistence on a literalist reading of the Bible and an apolitical church. The Union’s Civil War emancipation policy, in particular, pushed antislavery conservatives into the proslavery camp, leading them to embrace a Confederate identity even as the southern nation collapsed.

Harlow primarily examines the published writings of white religious leaders in the three-sided debate over slavery’s place in Kentucky, though the voices of black evangelicals do not go unnoticed. Nonetheless, Harlow’s analysis foregrounds the opinions of conservative antislavery leaders such as Presbyterian Stuart Robinson and Baptist James L. Pendleton, individuals who called for slavery’s gradual end (and colonization) but whose theological and ideological differences with radical abolitionists eventually led them to align with proslavery forces. Conservative emancipationists, Harlow notes, played a central role in the sectional schisms within evangelical denominations in the 1830s and 1840s, led the failed campaign to include a gradual emancipation provision in Kentucky’s 1850 constitution, supported Kentucky’s neutrality during the secession crisis and proslavery unionism in the early months of the war, and ultimately rejected Abraham Lincoln’s wartime emancipationist policies. These stands, Harlow argues, reflected conservative evangelicals’ conclusion that abolitionists, in condemning the biblically sanctioned institution of slavery, endorsed a heretical reading of scriptures, threatened the racial hierarchy of the state, and provoked the secession crisis by endangering the religious and constitutional freedoms of slaveholders.

Harlow’s examination of the small number of radical voices in Kentucky reveals the wide gulf between evangelical conservatives and abolitionists. John G. Fee, for example, called for an end to black oppression and viewed racial “amalgamation” as the best means to destroy “racial caste” (95). The interracial Berea community, which he established in 1854 with Cassius Clay’s financial help, provoked hostility and ultimately violence among white Kentuckians, especially after Fee appeared [End Page 223] to endorse John Brown’s 1859 attack on Harpers Ferry. Harlow also notes African American evangelicals’ denunciation of slavery, including men like Josiah Henson and Henry Bibb who condemned the hypocrisy of proslavery Christians after escaping to freedom. The growing number of independent black churches in the state, Harlow adds, “confounded” the “logic” of proslavery evangelical whites who asserted that enslavement ensured “right belief” and “social control” among “spiritually inferior” African Americans (83). But such voices represented a distinct minority in Kentucky, and in the 1850s conservative evangelicals worked to silence radicals whom they believed sparked slave unrest.

In the wake of the war, conservative evangelicals dominated Kentucky and shaped its postwar racial order. The war may have ended slavery, Harlow argues, but it did not erode white evangelicals’ belief in the biblical sanction of slavery, the heretical nature of abolition, and the need for an apolitical church. Faced with a changed political landscape, they embraced segregation and the Democratic Party (and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan) as the best means to protect a white supremacist racial order. For Harlow, conservative white evangelicalism made possible the postwar “political hegemony” of white supremacy and “made Kentucky Confederate” (223).

In this well-researched study, Harlow adeptly traces the contours and racial limitations...

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