S. Jonathan Bass astutely sets the tone for this book with a title drawn from a nineteenth-century hymn. He also deftly displays a deep archival knowledge of the college’s history with many lively, pertinent anecdotes in this institutional history of Baptist Howard College (now Samford University) through the early twentieth century. Bass lays out his aim early on: “to reconstruct the ‘idea’ of Howard College and to recover the institution’s history and original mission – all within the context of southern history” (12). He argues this is necessary to correct a misconception among Howard’s and (later) Samford’s leaders that the institution was not a liberal arts college. Bass achieves his goal. In the process, he skillfully weaves the ever-present thread of religion at Howard into each piece of the college’s nineteenth-century history.

First, Bass vividly portrays the rough frontier culture and fervent revivalism of the southeastern Alabama town of Marion. This was Howard’s birthplace. Marion’s slaveholding Baptist elite hoped to curb frontier rowdyism through church discipline and education by the 1830s. Next, he focuses on the content of Howard’s early years. In chapters two and three, Bass shows how Samuel Sterling Sherman, a New England-educated teacher and Howard’s first president, raised the study body to a good number and instilled adequate discipline between 1839 and 1844. Bass also carefully distinguishes the college’s founding ideology – education for virtuous living modeled by its namesake, a faith-filled and benevolent English minister named John Howard – from the slaveholding money used to build and support it. Moreover, Howard’s students were pro-Union in the late 1840s and 1850s. However, they were firmly secessionist by 1861. Then, Bass demonstrates how Howard weathered a few storms by the end of 1865: Sherman’s departure over financial issues, a fire destroying its building, and the student body harmed by the fire and decimated by their fight for the Confederacy.

Howard, a Confederate hospital from 1863 to 1865, struggled to rebuild directly after the Civil War. Then, one man set Howard on a firm foundation during the end of Reconstruction. This was Col. J.T. Murfee. He instituted military discipline and tirelessly traveled to drum up support and students for Howard. By the 1880s, Murfee made Howard debt-free. He also kept Howard’s founding ideal of virtue front and center with consistent discipline. However, Bass illustrates how Murfee and members of the Alabama Baptist Convention fought over Howard’s future. Marion was in an economic slump throughout Reconstruction. Birmingham’s Baptist ministers, infected with the virus of New South boosterism, touted the Magic City as a better location for Howard. Murfee argued rural Marion offered a healthier moral climate than crime-ridden Birmingham. New South boosterism won. Alabama Baptists voted to move Howard to Birmingham in 1887 after enrollment dropped in 1886, race relations in Marion soured, and land companies in Birmingham promised big checks and new buildings.

Those were empty words. Birmingham’s economy tanked. Howard’s academic building was only a blueprint during the 1880s due to financial woes. Enrollment dropped due to the 1888 yellow fever epidemic sweeping the South. B.F. Riley, Howard’s president beginning in 1888, cleverly maneuvered Magic City investors and Birmingham Baptist leaders into putting money towards Academic Hall. He feigned a move for Howard to Florence, Alabama, in 1890. Birmingham’s prominent Baptist ministers rushed to get Steiner Bros., a pair of Birmingham bankers, to issue bonds for the construction of the academic building. Riley conserved Howard’s classical curriculum but could not raise money to pay the bonds back by mid-1893. Leaderless after Riley’s departure in 1894, Howard’s trustees added some scientific and progressive textbooks to the curriculum. Howard’s investors allowed the college more time to pay its mounting debts after assurances from Steiner Bros. Like other New South denominational colleges, Howard kept with its academic tradition of the liberal arts but struggled with chronic financial shortfalls.

Through such context-driven analysis, Bass succeeds in his purpose for the book. He faithfully follows the early revisionists in higher education history who argued for context-based histories of nineteenth-century colleges. Historians of religious higher education may question, however, if newer studies of southern denominational colleges would change Bass’s analysis. Religious historians have little to question and much to rejoice at. Bass consistently shows how revivals swept through the Howard student body through the 1890s. He also stresses how important faith, benevolence, and virtue were inside and outside Howard’s curriculum, grounding his analysis in the scholarship of Nathan Hatch, David Bebbington, and Mark Noll. This raises an important issue. Bass seemingly links contemporary scholarship on the liberal arts and Howard’s classical curriculum to highlight continuity in Howard’s original mission (11). Yet, he seemingly neglects nuanced differences or similarities between the classical aspects of the nineteenth-century curriculum and what may be considered classical under the term ‘liberal arts’ today.

However, that is a small matter which does not detract from the book as a whole. Baptists and religious historians will enjoy how Bass connects faith and manliness at Howard to scholarship on manhood and nineteenth-century southern cultural history. Scholars of religion and race in the South will appreciate Bass’s honest and careful evaluation of Howard’s religious ties to slavery, white supremacy, and the Lost Cause. Finally, readers interested in Alabama, Baptist, and Samford history will enjoy Bass’s trenchant narrative style that paints a realistic portrait of Howard (as the hymn in the book’s title later reads) as a “swelling tide of woes” with times of “sure retreat. . . found beneath the mercy seat.”