Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880 by Luke E. Harlow (review)

Luke Harlow’s Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880 has taken a story that specialists have come to know—that white Kentuckians came late to their embrace of Confederate culture, after the failure of that political state—and has used it to reveal connections between evangelical religious, racial, and political thought in nineteenth-century America on both sides of the Civil War that have never before been explored so deeply. Demonstrating these connections while also accounting for the discontinuities found there is a signal contribution to the field.

Harlow teases out three principle strains of religiously founded belief about slavery in the antebellum period, all living in uncomfortably close communion in the border state. Kentucky had its share of religiously motivated abolitionists. Unlike in other slaveholding states where such figures faced immediate expulsion, these abolitionists were able to exist and project their ideas for extended periods in Kentucky or, when faced with violence, just across the Ohio River in Cincinnati. John Fee and Cassius Clay worked for the immediate abolition of slavery, and in doing so they stretched evangelical religion in Kentucky and in the United States to its breaking point. Abolitionists were clearly the minority in the state and were judged heretics for their belief that true Christianity demanded not just the destruction of slavery but also the coexistence of white and black Christians on equal terms.

Kentucky’s proslavery Christians, not unlike those historian Charles Irons discovered in antebellum Virginia, found abolitionist politics and theology beyond the pale. Proslavery Christians believed in a divinely ordained racial hierarchy and that slavery expressed this order as well as any other such system they could imagine.

Harlow rightly spends the most time investigating Kentuckians who found themselves in an interstitial, antislavery theological and political space. These champions of a third way, especially the bilious Presbyterian Robert J. Breckinridge, believed slavery as practiced in the United States to be sinful and pushed for the gradual elimination of the institution in the state. Breckinridge hotly contended with proslavery Christians and for his trouble found himself on the receiving end of barbs from his proslavery brethren. Yet conservative antislavery Christians were as devoted to racial hierarchy as the most hardened proslavery evangelical. And so they believed abolitionists to be dangerous, violent heretics who threatened social, political, and religious orders alike. Abolitionists far and wide returned the spite they received from Kentucky’s antislavery conservatives in equal measure.

War and emancipation destroyed the principle antebellum division between pro- and antislavery conservative evangelicals even as the military conflict created new political and religious fractures. Those in the broad, conservative antislavery middle were at each other’s throats in the 1860s, furious over whether patriotic Christianity should find its way into pulpits. Political fault lines became theological ones as Kentuckians hauled each other into church courts to ascertain political sins. With most southern evangelicals in exile from national denominations, those Kentuckians who opposed explicitly political Unionist sentiments in the pulpit found themselves without allies. Southern sympathizers self-servingly called for a halt on all political speech from the pulpit, but such calls were ignored by Unionist evangelicals. Breckinridge, the antislavery conservative and hardened nationalist, pushed for ecclesiastical and criminal prosecution of coreligionists he suspected to have insufficient patriotism for the United States at war, pressing for penalties ranging from excommunication to execution.

Breckinridge’s unconditional and violent support for a regime committed to emancipation was certain to result in a backlash from his conservative, if antislavery, allies. By 1865 many, if not most, evangelical Kentuckians identified abolitionism and politicized pulpits with northern Christianity and flocked to southern denominations. Kentuckians scorned northern attempts to force southern Christians to publicly renounce slavery and secession. With slavery removed as a dividing line between Kentucky’s conservative factions, former antislavery and proslavery rivals could join together in common opposition both to patriotic northern moralizing and to civil...