Publisher’s Website<\/a><\/p>\nIn Bonds of Union:\u00a0 Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland<\/em>, Bridget Ford offers a strikingly unique take on the thirty-plus years of tumult that preceded and then encompassed the American Civil War. Instead of focusing upon how disagreements over slavery brought about the splintering of the American state, Ford emphasizes the ways diverse Americans maintained and even strengthened the connective tissue that bound them together in the body politic. Ford privileges the notion of \u201cUnion\u201d in explaining how and why people in the closely situated cities of Louisville and Cincinnati\u2014arguably the most divided region of an irreparably divided nation\u2014worked simultaneously toward a common victory and the end of slavery in spite of their many, many religious, racial, and political differences.<\/p>\nThe result is a powerful argument that the animating principle of \u201cAmerica,\u201d of the Union inseparable and perpetual as the political manifestation of the founder\u2019s ideas about liberty and freedom and democracy, sprang from more than just the celebrated political religion of Abraham Lincoln. In nimble prose supported by wide-ranging research, Ford introduces us to an array of black and white and Protestant and Catholic Kentuckians and Ohioans who cherished their nation and considered its preservation worthy of every sacrifice. She thus at once contributes to the recent scholarly appreciation for Unionism initiated in earnest by Gary Gallagher while problematizing \u201ceither\/or\u201d assumptions that cast wartime abolitionism and the preservation of the Union as wholly separate endeavors.<\/p>\n
Ford\u2019s study will appeal to a wide range of historians.\u00a0 Authorities on nineteenth-century urban history will find the effort highly useful, for in many ways it is a study of urbanites on the border between freedom and slavery. Students of antebellum and Civil War era religion, moreover, will no doubt appreciate the author\u2019s consideration of faith and devotion as agents of causation in the abolitionism and then Unionism of the believers she chronicles. Specialists who focus on slavery and politics in the border region will have much to consider as well, for the wartime Kentucky Unionists in Ford\u2019s telling are different than those whose loyalties were linked to their hopes for slavery\u2019s survival depicted by other scholars. All that said, with Bonds of Union:\u00a0 Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland, <\/em>Bridget Ford\u2019s greatest achievement is in reminding us of the relevance of idealism\u2014of decency and morality and inclusiveness and all of the other \u201cbetter angels of our nature,\u201d as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently put it\u2014in the patriotism of countless Americans of the Civil War era. \u00a0In this respect, Bridget Ford presents a past well worth repeating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Review: Bonds of Union Timothy L. Wesley Timothy L. Wesley is Assistant Professor of History at\u00a0Austin Peay State University. JSR Volume 18 Cite this Article Timothy L. Wesley, “Review: Bonds of Union,”\u00a0Journal of Southern Religion (18) (2016): wp.jsreligion.org\/vol18\/wesley2. Open-access license This work is licensed CC-BY. You are encouraged to make free use of this publication.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-690","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":702,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/690\/revisions\/702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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