Pious Ambitions is a biography of the life of Sally Merriam Wait, a nineteenth century evangelical New England woman who becomes the wife of the Reverend Samuel Wait, the first president of what would become Wake Forest University. The biography situates Sally Wait amidst some of the most important movements and moments of the nineteenth century and reveals her to be far more than the helpmeet of a well-known educational figure. As readers will discover, the life of Sally Wait is a powerful example of how a bright, ambitious, devout woman confronted the limited opportunities and significant obstacles her sex faced in antebellum America. Tribble's coverage begins with a retelling of Sally's conversion experience as a member of a small Vermont evangelical community and follows her life throughout her courtship and marriage to Samuel Wait, a fellow New England evangelical and aspiring minister. The Wait's journey together, often tragically spent apart for what amounts to many years of their early-married life, takes the reader from rural New England to Samuel's experiences with Columbia College in Washington, D.C. before ultimately following the couple on their missionary call to rural, antebellum North Carolina. The book's title, Pious Ambitions, reveals the central theme of Sally's life experience. She is a smart, deeply committed Christian who aspires to make meaningful contributions to God's kingdom. Sally deeply admired the missionary work of Ann Hasseltine Judson in Asia and longed to make similar contributions but instead found herself restrained by the tenets of faith to which she herself adhered. Her commitment to the evangelical ideals about a woman's role within marriage forced Sally to curtail her own ambitions in order to support Samuel's call to ministry. Her compliance, albeit not without input and at times expressed frustration, with the demands of Samuel's calling pulled Sally into creative entrepreneurial endeavors, travels within the rapidly expanding and changing United States, direct contact with the institution of slavery, and decision-making that was in direct contradiction to her New England family's wishes. Tribble skillfully embeds these aspects of Sally's life within the contexts of the Second Great Awakening, the Market Revolution, and the national divisions over the future of slavery within the United States. Sally's actions and reactions to these developments reveal the individual choices people confronted as they navigated the complex and sometimes conflicting expectations and aspirations of faith, marriage, parenthood, citizenship, and personal ambition in antebellum America.

Tribble drew her narrative from Sally Merriam Wait's journal and substantial correspondence that are part of the Special Collections and Archives at Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University as well as letters and an essay book that remain within family hands. The possessors of Wait's writings reveal an interesting facet of Tribble's relationship to her subject Sally Merriam Wait. Mary Tribble is both a direct descendant of Sally Merriam Wait and is an employee of Wake Forest University. One does not usually encourage family members to undertake an academic study of their own family, nor is writing about a subject that directly impacts one's employer a simple and straightforward task. That said, Tribble handles both challenges with aplomb. While it is clear the author admires Sally, she does not shy away from asking hard questions about her subject and family member. Her approach is scholarly, substantive and balanced. No aspect of the book demonstrates this more clearly than Tribble's direct discussion and interrogation of Sally and Samuel Wait's transition from an anti-slavery familial background to directly relying upon enslaved labor in Washington, D.C. and later employing and owning enslaved laborers in North Carolina. While the available sources do not reveal much of the Wait's thinking behind such actions, Tribble wrestles with them honestly and includes them as a central component of her analysis. In addressing the correspondence containing her subjects’ religious views and lived experiences, Tribble's narrative is akin to Robert Manson Myers’ edited collection of the letters of Presbyterian minister Reverend Charles Colcock Jones, albeit far more readable than that extensive and dense work. (The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War [Yale University Press, 1972]) The publication of Pious Ambitions is also a timely addition to the literature on North Carolina Baptists as it comes on the heels of Roger H. Crook's 2018 biography of Thomas Meredith. (Thomas Meredith : A Man of His Time -- a Man Ahead of His Time [Baptist History & Heritage Society, 2018]) Similar to the Waits, Thomas Meredith was another northerner whose missionary role carried him into antebellum North Carolina where he became both a slave owner and public defender of the institution. These two recent works help us grasp with the ways that evangelical Christianity and slavery intertwined within the South and shaped the lives and perspectives of those who came within reach of its influence. Such works provide important background information for scholars who continue to wrestle with the ways slavery and race shaped institutions of higher education. Tribble demonstrates her awareness and appreciation of this important work by acknowledging the contributions of Wake Forest's Slavery, Race, and Memory Project to her own work. Readers of Pious Ambitions will find themselves offering similar thanks to Mary Tribble for illuminating the life of Sally Merriam Wait, a woman whose life experiences reveal the fascinating interplay between gender, race, region, and religion in antebellum America.