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Gaines M. Foster, Bridget Ford. Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 228–229, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.228
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In Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland, Bridget Ford studies a borderland between North and South, the Ohio River Valley, concentrating on Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky. Ford not only writes about a geographical borderland but also lodges her study within the historiographical borderland between cultural and political history. Studying the years leading up to and through the Civil War, she seeks to “understand what Americans thought held them together in ‘union’ when that relationship was severely tested” (xi), a topic of enormous importance in understanding the Civil War. Although she does not ignore politics, her focus is on cultural developments, including tensions between Protestants and Catholics, anti-slavery movements, the cities’ African American communities, and the efforts of relief societies during the Civil War.
Bonds of Union begins with an insightful discussion of the tensions and competition between, on the one hand, Protestants, shaped by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, and, on the other, a growing German American Catholic population. The two groups sometimes fought; the area experienced a few anti-Catholic riots. But through their competition for converts, “between 1830 and 1860 Catholics and Protestants grew to resemble each other in both their outward guises and internal imperatives” (29). The German American Catholics adopted the revivalists’ plain style of preaching, and the Protestants began to build medieval-style churches. Both groups also promoted closer ties among their members, the Catholics through devotional meditations and the Protestants with religious poetry.
