Harlow argues that Kentucky's apparent turn from a Union state with antislavery leanings to one that embraced a Confederate identity was actually a straight line. Harlow admits that Kentucky's antislavery gradualists were not proslavery, but neither, he insists, did they occupy neutral ground in the fight over slavery. Rather, they shared three core commitments with their proslavery coreligionists that explain Kentucky's seamless transition toward Confederate political loyalties: anti-abolitionism; white supremacy; and evangelicalism, specifically an evangelical belief in the biblical sanction of slavery in the abstract. Kentucky's loyalty to the Union was predicated on the Union's support of slavery. Following emancipation, when it became increasingly clear that the Union was itself abolitionist, white Kentuckians (with the notable exception of Kentucky's chief antislavery gradualist, Robert J. Breckenridge) simply followed the logic of their cultural commitments to a Southern identity and the Democratic Party. Harlow's astute, carefully researched account reveals the evangelical origins of Kentucky's cultural and political trajectory.

In fact, Harlow so successfully demonstrates the consistency of white Kentuckians' views on slavery that one might wonder whether he might be demanding explanation from the wrong quarters. Harlow denies the legitimacy of a “middle ground” on slavery, which he calls a “conceit,” but gradualism was a well-trodden path compared to immediatism. Harlow's very effort to explain white Kentucky's refusal to welcome immediate emancipation demonstrates how deeply separated historians of antislavery are from the perspective of their subjects, most of whom would marvel that the refusal to welcome immediatism rather than immediatism itself would demand explanation.