In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland by Bridget Ford
  • Aaron Astor
Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland. By Bridget Ford (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2016) 398 pp. $45.00

In a speech to citizens in Peoria, Illinois, in 1854 Abraham Lincoln criticized the recently passed Kansas-Nebraska Act for its dismantling of the decades-long legal prohibition against the spread of slavery west of Missouri. He said that thenceforth, Americans were to forge “new bonds of Union” based not on sectional compromises over slavery but on the principle of universal freedom (ix). As Ford notes, the phrase “bonds of Union” was primarily a religious one, referring to relations between believers and Christ, or among members of a Christian community. When Lincoln repeated the term “bonds of Union” in his famous 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, he struck a theological chord in the festering debate about slavery and the nation’s future.

Ford’s latest book explores the substance and texture of these “bonds of Union” in one of the most contested regions of the country, the Ohio River Valley, from the 1820s through the end of the Civil War. In that region of the West—especially in Cincinnati and Louisville, its largest cities—ordinary people had forged a new identity that, in [End Page 565] Ford’s interpretation, had withstood and ultimately defeated the sectionalist antagonism coming from the South. At the heart of this project were efforts by Christians—Protestants and Catholics, both black and white—to imagine a society free from slavery and racial oppression, open to immigrants from across Europe and inclusive of peoples from the North and South.

Unlike most other works detailing the sectional interplay between antebellum Ohioans and Kentuckians, Ford’s is a superb work of interdisciplinary history that takes seriously the theological debates and literary tropes circulating in the Ohio Valley. Unlike many scholars who use church histories to tell social histories, Ford incorporates the social history of Baptist, Methodist and Catholic communities to assess the spiritual meaning of the Christian experience at this particular historical moment.

The first three chapters about relations between Catholics and Protestants are the most compelling methodologically. Ford notes that European Catholics (especially from Bavaria and Austria) settled in Cincinnati and Louisville in the 1840s at the very moment when Protestant evangelicals reinvigorated their own mission in the trans-Appalachian West. A collision was inevitable, often resulting in street riots between nativists and German and Irish immigrants. But as Ford deftly notes, the church communities actually borrowed from one another and engaged more in a friendly competition for souls than a vicious religious war resembling Reformation Europe.

For example, Austrian-based Catholic missionaries began circulating and encouraging the use of devotional and meditative poetry to allow the faithful to pray in private and family settings. Though much more common in Protestant practice, these devotionals became intensely popular among Catholics in the Ohio Valley. At the same time, ardent Protestants drew aesthetic inspiration from the sizable Catholic cathedrals under construction, as ornate Baptist and Methodist churches began to appear in the heart of Cincinnati and Louisville.

Ford connects the religious fervor to the question of race and slavery, demonstrating the power of evangelicals in Cincinnati in opposing the state’s anti-black laws and making the city a bulwark of abolitionism. At the same time, free black Baptists in Louisville rejected the pro-slavery Christianity of the state’s white Baptists after the famous sectional split of the 1840s; white Baptists argued that their church was essential to bring the gospel to slaves. Black Baptists who separated from the white Southern Baptist church embraced a vision of freedom and racial equality akin to what Cincinnati’s evangelicals (of both races and denominations) advanced. Ford’s remarks about the literary interventions from black and white writers alike make a strong case that many people in the Ohio Valley imagined “new bonds of Union” that could define the region’s and the nation’s future.

The book is less persuasive as an analysis of political Unionism along the Ohio River valley, mostly because of...

pdf

Share