Pious Ambitions: Sally Merriam Wait's Mission South, 1813–1831 by Mary Tribble (review)

After her baptism in 1813, eighteen-year-old Sarah "Sally" Merriam of Brandon, Vermont, envisioned herself answering a call from God to serve in the jungles of Burma. Sally hoped to follow the trail blazed by missionary Harriet Atwood Newell and the famed couple Ann and Adoniram Judson, but her calling ultimately followed that of her husband's, the young Baptist preacher Samuel Wait, whom she wed in 1818. Instead of Burma, Sally settled for North Carolina where Samuel became the first president of the Wake Forest Manual Labor Institute (now Wake Forest University) in 1834. Pious Ambitions, Mary Tribble's biography of Sally Merriam Wait, reveals the winding path that brought Sally to that place. Positioning her research among other studies of evangelicalism and marriage in the early republic, Tribble chronicles the evolution of a young and fervent Baptist woman as "the power of pious ambitions" (xviii)—that is, religious duty—guided her, compelling her to either sacrifice or redefine her own aspirations to become a submissive helpmeet and matriarch of a minister's household.

Samuel Wait's pastoral calling first took Sally from Vermont to Sharon, Massachusetts, where he led a small Baptist congregation between 1818 and 1820, and then to Washington, DC, where he worked as a tutor for Columbian College from 1822 to 1826. Samuel's journey next brought Sally to New Bern, North Carolina, in 1827 where he served as pastor for the burgeoning port's Baptist church, and, finally, to a small community near Raleigh where he presided over Wake Forest. Marriage required Sally to temper her own ambitions and "accept the limits of a woman's role in the secular and evangelical communities" (67). Those limitations occasionally taxed Sally's body, mind, and soul. The couple spent only seven of their first thirteen married years together as Samuel's own pious ambitions drew him from home and family. Between 1820 and 1822, for example, he boarded in Philadelphia while studying at the Philadelphia Theological Seminary; without an income, Sally returned to her family in Vermont where she supported herself and her husband's education by crafting and selling bonnets with her sister. Besides financial hardships, Sally shouldered emotional trauma during Samuel's extended absences. In 1829, with Samuel itinerating in North Carolina for the state Baptist convention, Sally once again returned to Vermont where their youngest child fell ill and died. (The inability of a young minister—particularly an itinerant—to both support a household and administer his clerical duties initially caused the Methodists to discourage their preachers from marrying.)¹

During these periods of isolation and separation, Sally coped by leaning on her religious convictions and resigning herself to the will of God. As Tribble iterates, Sally "had the comfort that their separation was guided by their shared duty to God" (172). Sally—a modified Calvinist—drew inspiration from Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (much of Sally's journal is an amalgamation of her own words and scripture, a significant point that Tribble does not address). Sally had to reassure herself constantly that her marriage satisfied a higher purpose, as evinced when she wrote to Samuel in 1821, "That which providence has designed for me, is for me the best" (72). Sally's acquiescence did not come easily, as she struggled to reconcile her desire to establish a stable home with the knowledge that God might require her to support her husband from afar.

Besides exploring the dynamics of the Wait household and Sally's interpretations of womanhood and faith, Pious Ambitions traces how the Waits's path from New England to North Carolina mirrored the social and economic progress of American Baptists in the early nineteenth century. Not long after her baptism, musings about modest Christian attire and behavior filled Sally's writings, and later, when marketing bonnets, she worried that some of...