S. Jonathan Bass is the university historian at Samford University in Birmingham. His Blessed are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (also published with LSU Press) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, on one hand, a book on the origins of Samford University seems fitting for a historian recognized for his work on Alabama history, Civil Rights, and the Jim Crow South. On the other hand, Bass’s latest work, From Every Stormy Wind That Blows, encompasses far more than Southern history. Any Baptist historian will be surprised to find just how many names are familiar—and unfamiliar—in Bass’s extensive cast of characters. For example, Basil Manly, one of the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention, plays an interesting role in the book, as he was considered a “mighty magnet” during his presidency at the University of Alabama, drawing Baptist boys away from Howard College, a Baptist school (p. 66). The story of Howard College was an arduous (and often unsuccessful) quest to galvanize the Baptist churches of Alabama to support an institution designed to educate and improve the lives of their own people. Taking the reader on a journey through nineteenth-century America, Bass tells this story well.

Bass grounds the religious beginnings of Howard College in the Second Great Awakening, identifying the school as a nexus of three strains of revivalism: Timothy Dwight at Yale, the western camp meetings of Cane Ridge, and the revivalism of Charles Finney in the “Burned Over District” (p. 2). This is the sort of religious history you would not necessarily expect from a Civil Rights historian. Bass locates these revivalist influences in the founders of the school, each bringing their own unique flavor to Howard College (named after the English reformer John Howard, who embodied an enlightened Christian model of education). Ultimately, for Bass, the “idea” of Howard College was its emphasis upon the virtue and character of its students, “to liberate young men from the corrupting influences of frontier rowdyism, plantation hedonism, and cultural secularism and transform them into useful and enlightened Christian citizens” (p. 5).

Taking the reader on a ride from the frontier South to the Old South to the New South, Bass begins by showing how agrarian Baptists of the Black Belt attempted to save and sanctify the unsavory cotton and slave speculators of the Alabama frontier. From temperance to Sabbath schools (ch. 1), to a classical school (ch. 2), to literary societies (ch. 3), Howard established itself upon “a Common Sense liberal arts curriculum rooted in the classics and the Bible” (p. 42). When revivals broke out, as one did in 1850, “most Howard students professed Christianity and participated in prayer meetings to fan the flames of revival fires” (p. 51). In the antebellum period, Howard was firmly rooted in its revivalist context.

The middle chapters of the book cover the financial strain caused by the Civil War and the revolving door of presidents who helped steer the school in its wake. Howard was indelibly shaped by the war of secession. Presidents went off to serve for the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, others sought to mold the school into a military academy where cadets wore “soldier like” uniforms modeled after the Confederate gray (p. 124). Students gave orations on the military genius of Stonewall Jackson. At one point, the Howard banner was even a version of the Confederate flag. In the black, fertile soil of Marion, Alabama, the myth of the Lost Cause grew abundantly.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the book is Bass’s ability to demonstrate the tensions that existed in Alabama through the middle and end of the nineteenth century and how this led to agonizing fundraising endeavors in a divided state. Just as the nation itself was divided, so was the South, and so were the Baptists themselves. “Many churchgoers, especially in North Alabama, viewed Howard as a school of the planter-dominated Black Belt or simply Marion’s college and not a denominational school for all Alabama Baptists” (p. 121). In addition to regional prejudices, which had already been encountered by a host of Southern Baptist educators, especially those in South Carolina, Alabama also presented socioeconomic challenges and political rivalries. Bass brings these out well in the book. There were southern aristocrats and hill country commoners. There were Greenback Labor partisans and Bourbon Democrats. Alabama was, in effect, a microcosm of the Reconstruction South.

Most important to the fundraising efforts of the college, the state was also divided between the Old South culture of Black Belt towns like Marion and the New South ambitions of industrial cities like Birmingham. Beginning in chapter 11, Bass chronicles how the fundraising woes of the school eventually factored into its transition to Birmingham. As a “live, stirring city” filled with New South boosterism and industrial wealth, Birmingham presented an optimistic future for the school. “It was no coincidence that these forces supporting the relocation of Howard College jumped into the fray as soon as the Alabama Baptist State Convention received sole ownership of the institution” (p. 156). In this sense, the religious dynamics of the school were a critical piece in Howard’s eventual growth (although, as Bass shows, Birmingham did not solve Howard’s problems overnight).

Bass’s book is about more than the history of one school. It is also about the transformation of the American South and the nation at large. When Howard looked to new beginnings, it embodied a new worldview in the Southern mind. “Gone were the old rural values built upon cotton agriculture, plantation paternalism, and slave labor; these were replaced with industrialization, urbanization, and individualism” (p. 173). For many Americans today, the city of Birmingham embodies an older version of the South. However, as Bass shows, there was a time not so long ago when Birmingham represented the newer South.

Although his references to the North are relatively scarce, and the book could have benefited from a broader view of the American landscape, Bass does note President Benjamin L. Riley’s attempt to forge an alliance with John D. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago in 1893 (pp. 257–58). Indeed, it should not be overlooked that Baptists everywhere were pioneering new ways to educate their people and the world. And this is one of the most valuable insights in the book: in the nineteenth century, establishing and sustaining educational institutions was a messy, thankless, inglorious business and required an enormous amount of sacrifice and hard work from men and women who often did not see much reward for their efforts aside from the comfort of knowing that they were doing the Lord’s will. Bass shows how the fluid, unpredictable nature of higher education is but a reflection of the nation itself. In so doing, the author tells the story of the American South at both the micro and macro levels. Every crop failure, every change in trustee leadership, and every racist act on the sidewalk of a small Alabama town could spell imminent disaster for a fledgling Baptist school. However, through many trials and tribulations (and trustees), Howard College (now Samford) endured.