James Slatton has provided us an examination of a major conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention that resulted in firings, the creation of new seminaries, and the formation of powerful alliances of pastors and denominational officials based on theological allegiances. For observers of American religious life who are familiar with the moderate-fundamentalist conflict of the SBC that began in 1979, this description of Slatton's book may seem to promise another examination of this still-contemporary development. However, Slatton has immersed himself in the study of a movement that predates the current conflict by almost a century, the Landmark controversy and the firing of Southern Baptist Seminary president and professor of church history, William Heth Whitsitt.

Slatton's study, based upon papers and diaries that he discovered in the possession of a direct descendent of Whitsitt, gives a detailed and readable biography of a key figure in the Landmark Movement. The Landmark Movement was a restorationist-type movement in Southern Baptist life that emphasized that Baptist churches were formed in the first century c.e. and existed in an unbroken line to the present. As a form of American frontier apostolic successionism, the Landmark Movement emerged in a time of intense denominational rivalry in the United States. With various denominations making claims of superiority, the Landmark Movement put many Baptists in the position of claiming that their church was the only true church and that all other denominations were somehow deficient. Never the position of the first Baptists of the 1600s, Landmark successionism appeared on the scene in the United States through the work of Nashville minister and editor, J. R. Graves, and it quickly gained a dominant position in the Southern Baptist psyche. To question its tenets was to risk the label of Baptist heretic.

William Heth Whitsitt was one of the original faculty members of the newly organized Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, formed in Greeneville, S.C., before the Civil War, and relocated to Louisville, Ky., after the Civil War. A trained church historian who studied in Europe, Whitsitt intended to embrace the world of scholarship and not merely the world of practical ministerial education. His “discovery” of widely available and largely unused primary documents from the early period of Baptist history made him aware of what was indisputable by the standards of historical scholarship—Baptists practiced baptism by affusion for the first decades of their existence and adopted immersion only after having been a movement for several years. His findings, published in academic and non-denominational venues, were unnoticed when he was a professor but were discovered after he assumed the presidency of the seminary. As forces lined up, and as the divisions came to involve personality and theology, Whitsitt became a man under siege and eventually was forced from his leadership at Southern. He settled in Richmond and taught at Baptist-related University of Richmond until his death.

Slatton's work meticulously examines Whitsitt's papers and diaries, as well as the extensive collection of materials related to these years at the Library of Virginia, the Virginia Baptist History Society, and the James P. Boyce Library of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In addition to these sources, the study examines the materials of numerous state denominational papers, which themselves divided over the issue. This examination of Whitsitt provides a needed supplement to earlier unpublished dissertations that did not have access to the primary documents discovered by Slatton.

The book is well-written and accessible and of interest to all readers who have interest in a specific aspect of nineteenth century southern Protestant religious conflict. Naturally, students of Baptist history will especially find the book helpful. The book does not, however, examine secondary literature in the field very extensively, nor does it integrate studies of other Whitsitt-related people and events into the study. Missing, for example, are references to the important dissertation examination of J. R. Graves by Marty Bell and the study of B. H. Carroll by Alan Lefever. In addition the book stresses the theological basis of the conflict between Whisitt supporters and the Landmark Movement without examining other contributing factors to the conflict, such as class division and an urban/rural division. These issues do not diminish the strengths of the book, though. James Slatton's study of W. H. Whitsitt is an important study of this key figure in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention and it will remain a standard source for this topic.