Pious Ambitions: Sally Merriam Wait’s Mission South, 1813–1831 by Mary Tribble

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pious Ambitions: Sally Merriam Wait’s Mission South, 1813–1831 by Mary Tribble Patrick W. O’Neil Pious Ambitions: Sally Merriam Wait’s Mission South, 1813–1831. By Mary Tribble. America’s Baptists. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xx, 242. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-683-4.) In 1820, Sally Merriam Wait, a young woman living in Brandon, Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to her husband, who was studying theology in Philadelphia. “Every step you advance,” she told him, “leaves me one farther behind” (p. 50). In Pious Ambitions: Sally Merriam Wait’s Mission South, 1813–1831, Mary Tribble charts the ways that Wait’s faith intersected with the power and anxiety of ambition. Wait’s husband, Samuel, was a Baptist minister and the first president of what became Wake Forest University, and Tribble describes Sally Wait as caught in a series of traps: between defining herself as a minister’s wife or as a missionary’s, learning for her own good or her husband’s, following her own will or God’s. At the same time, her journey entrapped the enslaved African Americans whom this New Englander encountered in Washington, D.C., as well as the two women she eventually owned in North Carolina. Mining Wait’s diary and her family correspondence, documents that span from her childhood in Vermont to her settling in Wake Forest, North Carolina, Pious Ambitions never makes the traps Wait encountered seem predetermined. Instead, the book lets history unfold at the same rate that historical actors experienced it, revealing their perspectives as they evolved. Wait’s flashes of ambition and her efforts to tamp them down emerge from a well-explained web of context. Her lack of interest in Black people’s own ambitions was as callow as the sentiments of most white Americans of her time. [End Page 139] Tribble is really telling two stories. The first follows Wait’s repeated discovery (and her sometime invocation) of the limits that nineteenth-century America placed on women and the role that evangelical Christianity played in both her ambitions and their limits. It is a story many historians have told. What sets Pious Ambitions apart is merely that Tribble tells it so well. The reader leaves with a robust understanding of how belief was affected by other factors, not only gender, certainly, but also changes in the economy and, fascinatingly, the ambitions that early national Baptist leaders harbored for themselves. Tribble fills out the blank spaces in Wait’s diary and correspondence with records from her evangelical contemporaries, most especially the English missionary Ann Judson. In a neat twist, Wait tracked Judson’s travels in the press and even met her in the early days of her celebrity. Tribble helps the reader perceive the resonances and disjunctures between the experiences of these two women and notes the Waits’ choice not to pursue their ministry overseas. A hidden story in this section is the back-and-forth between converts and the press and how evangelical boosters powerfully framed converts’ experiences. (I am still not convinced that a mission to Burma was quite the white whale that Tribble makes it out to be: Wait admired Judson and briefly considered following her, but we never actually read her saying she wanted to go.) Tribble’s second story is a regional one, tracing the paths that northerners took toward the South. This story is less satisfying, partly because the Waits’ discussions of the South were so muted. The couple entertained trepidations about the region’s heat and “ignorance,” and Sally Wait disliked the idea of staying there for reasons Tribble does not clearly articulate (p. 152). Some of Wait’s family members chastised the couple for living in slavery country. But if the couple wrote back, their responses have not survived. One wishes that Tribble had made more of this part of the story. She ends her narrative in 1831, before Wait settled permanently in North Carolina, and (perhaps) before most white northerners came to see the South as so foreign a place. Pious Ambitions, so subtle and powerful in finding meaning in one woman’s experience of her faith, could do something similar...