The extremist discourse of “disunion” merits every bit of the significance it receives in Elizabeth Varon's Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Yet also significant were the border regions that made compromise supreme. What might we learn from these cultures that opted for Unionism, but only just barely? What bonds held border residents together amid secession, war, and the mission creep toward emancipation? This is the question Bridget Ford sets out to answer in Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland. Unlike works that emphasize wartime Republican concessions to the region's anti-emancipation forces, or market ties north of the Mason-Dixon line, this book contends that the wartime politics of Louisville, Kentucky and Cincinnati, Ohio originated in a distinct and intentional kind of “union thinking” (xvi) rooted in their residents’ lived experiences and affective ties. Long before the secession crisis, urban dwellers in the Ohio River Valley were busy bridging the many religious, racial, and political divisions that took on particular urgency in their booming cities. The very fate of the Union and emancipation, Ford argues, would depend on such bonds.

Ford approaches the Ohio River Valley as a skeleton key to unlocking the cultural dynamics of the Civil War era. This borderland is indeed a fascinating laboratory for examining the era's demographic diversity and major political battles: never exclusively Western, Northern, or Southern in ethos, it was also home to immigrants, free blacks, and slaves; saw more open and high-stakes debate over slavery than elsewhere; and nurtured a “peculiar religious culture” (43) shaped by the rapid growth of evangelical Protestantism and German Catholicism. Ford aptly compares Cincinnati, a free city plagued by racial violence, but which claimed key voices in the national antislavery movement (such as Harriet Beecher Stowe), and Louisville, a slave city that embraced its role as economic mediator between North and South, and tolerated open discussion of the slavery question despite its economic dependence on the institution. Limiting her study to these local contexts, Ford sets out to add a cultural dimension to our understanding of political bonds. Accordingly, this book plumbs such disparate topics as Catholic-Protestant competition, devotional poetry, interracial relations, education reform, debates over slavery, constitutional interpretation, care for suffering Union soldiers, and the regional politics of emancipation. Although these topics are somewhat uneven in their suitability to Ford's overarching argument, many of the individual chapters shine on their own, most notably those on African American hairdressers and barbers who forged interracial bonds of refinement by servicing whites in Louisville, and on that city's black Protestant opposition to the slave missions of Southern Baptist and Methodist churches—opposition that weakened the evangelistic argument for slavery in those local communions.

For all the detail this local approach affords, however, it also puts a heavy burden on the author to erect clear signposts indicating whether these developments were unique to these cities, regionally influential, or representative of events in other urban locales. Those signposts are often hard to locate, particularly with respect to religious developments. Although Ford argues for the disproportionate influence of these cities on their rural surrounds, it is sometimes unclear whether the religious bonds of union that Ford describes—particularly those that ran counter to slavery and white supremacy—would have found many parallels among Kentuckians outside Louisville. Contrary to the white urban Methodists who might have been swayed by their black Protestant neighbors’ opposition to slave missions, Methodists in most of Kentucky felt no such pull. Indeed, even within the Louisville Conference of the MECS, the 1844 schism over slavery resurfaced with a vengeance during the Civil War, with one federal chaplain joining forces with Union soldiers in 1863 to coerce oaths of allegiance from member preachers—an episode that receives no mention here. Moreover, as Luke Harlow has recently argued, Kentucky's white Protestants may have debated the question of slavery, but they had few reservations sanctifying white supremacy along with their Southern counterparts. What ought we to make of this racial “bond of union”—and indeed the likelihood that the region's most powerful cultural bonds were built on exclusion rather than “imagined bonds between strangers who shared neither kinship nor cultural affinity” (xvi)? Ford's regional comparisons also tend to favor northern rather than southern points of reference, leaving this reader to wonder about similarities to other wartime borderlands, as well as the Upper South's strong cross-currents of localism that would eventually overwhelm Kentucky's nationalist impulses. To be sure, Ford is generally careful to avoid overstating her argument. Yet more explicit claims about whether the strains of “union thinking” she identifies were distinctive or not, or perhaps uniquely consequential, might have clarified her argument's larger implications.

This book also leaves two topics unexplored. First is the regionally powerful discourse of religious apoliticism that emanated from Louisville during the war, primarily through the person of Presbyterian Rev. Stuart Robinson. Did this apolitical posture, often code for Southern sympathies, mitigate disunion? Second, although Ford agrees with other historians that white Kentuckians embraced the Lost Cause after the Civil War, she declines to speculate about how “union thinking” survived or evolved in this postwar context. Did these “bonds of union” shed any interracial dimension and mutate into the late-century calls for white reconciliation we see in works by David Blight and Ed Blum? Did Cincinnati and Louisville diverge in their loyalties and politics, or did the region remain a distinct borderland in certain respects? A statement about how Ford sees her work connecting to the postbellum era would help to make sense of why racial and religious bonds of union, so critical to the war years, were so inadequate to addressing the racial divisions that followed.

These criticisms aside, this is an eminently readable, carefully researched, and provocative book. It holds insights for all who are interested in the region's religious and antislavery history, and all who wonder how Americans once imagined their bonds to each another and the nation.