Professor Ford’s scholarship has earned a number of national and regional awards. In 1989 the Southern Historical Association awarded Ford its Francis Butler Simkins Book Prize for his Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (Oxford University Press, 1988). In 1984, Ford won the Louis Pelzer Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians for his article “Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865-1900,”in the Journal of American History (1984). In addition to these professional awards, Ford has won three prestigious national research grants. Twice Ford has held a coveted National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship (1986-87, 2000-01), and during the 1991-92 academic year, he was an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellow. In addition to these awards and fellowships, Ford has also served on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Southern History (1990-1994), and the Journal of the Early Republic (1998-2002). Ford has published more than a dozen articles and essays in scholarly journals, including the Journal of Southern History, Journal of American History, Journal of the Early Republic, Agricultural History, Reviews in American History, and others.

Ford's recent publications include “Making the ‘White Man’s Country’White: Race and State Constitutions in the Jacksonian South,” Journal of the Early Republic, 19 (Winter 1999): 713-737, which provides a revealing look at internal disagreements within the South over the future of slavery and related issues and “Reconsidering the Internal Slave Trade: Paternalism, Markets and the Character of the Old South,”in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: The Domestic Slave Trade in the United States (Yale University Press, 2004) which explores the impact of the internal slave trade on the alleged “paternalism” of slaveholders and analyzes the lower South’s increasing isolation in its commitment to slavery as a permanent institution. Ford’s edited volume on Civil War era historiography, The Blackwell Companion to Civil War and Reconstruction, appeared in Blackwell’s highly-regarded Companion series in January 2005. Ford is currently working on a book manuscript, Constructing the Old South: White Attitudes Toward The Problem of Slavery,1790-1835.