This history of the Civil War era reveals how unexpected bonds of union forged among diverse peoples in the Ohio-Kentucky borderlands furthered emancipation through a period of spiraling chaos, violence, and war between 1830 and 1865. Moving beyond familiar arguments about Lincoln’s deft politics or regional commercial ties, Bonds of Union recovers the potent religious, racial, and political attachments holding the country together at one of its most likely breaking points, the Ohio River. Living in a bitterly contested region, the Americans examined here—Protestant and Catholic, black and wh ... More

This history of the Civil War era reveals how unexpected bonds of union forged among diverse peoples in the Ohio-Kentucky borderlands furthered emancipation through a period of spiraling chaos, violence, and war between 1830 and 1865. Moving beyond familiar arguments about Lincoln’s deft politics or regional commercial ties, Bonds of Union recovers the potent religious, racial, and political attachments holding the country together at one of its most likely breaking points, the Ohio River. Living in a bitterly contested region, the Americans examined here—Protestant and Catholic, black and white, northerner and southerner—wanted to understand the daily lives and struggles of those on the opposite side of vexing human and ideological divides. Through close study of religious devotionalism, universal public education regardless of race, and relief from suffering during wartime, this book recovers a surprisingly capacious and inclusive sense of political union in the Civil War era. While accounting for the era’s many disintegrative forces, Bonds of Union reveals the imaginative work that went into bridging stark differences in lived experience, and the author posits that work as a precondition for slavery’s end and the Union’s persistence. This book reveals greater cultural flexibility or malleability among Americans in an era defined by the hardening of ideological positions. Bonds of Union also deepens our understanding of the antislavery origins of the United States’ Civil War in a region conventionally thought to be hostile to emancipation and racial equality.