The influential role Tichenor played in shaping both the Baptist denomination and southern culture

Isaac Taylor Tichenor worked as a Confederate chaplain, a mining executive, and as president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama (now Auburn University). He also served as corresponding secretary for the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta from 1882 until 1899. In these capacities Tichenor developed the New South ideas that were incorporated into every aspect of his work and ultimately influenced many areas of southern life, including business, education, religion, and culture.

In Isaac Taylor Tichenor: The Creation of the Baptist New South, Michael E. Williams Sr. provides a comprehensive analysis of Tichenor’s life, examining the overall impact of his life and work. This volume also documents the methodologies Tichenor used to rally Southern Baptist support around its struggling Home Mission Board, which defined the makeup of the Southern Baptist Convention and defended the territory of the convention.

Tichenor was highly influential in forming a uniquely southern mindset prior to and at the turn of the century. Williams contends that Tichenor’s role in shaping Southern Baptists as they became the largest denomination in the South was crucial in determining their identity both the identities of the region and the SBC.

Michael E. Williams Sr. is dean of humanities and social sciences and professor of history at Dallas Baptist University and author of To God Be the Glory: The Centennial History of Dallas Baptist University, 1898–1998.

"Isaac T. Tichenor was clearing a seminal figure in the creation of the South's great post-war myth: the people who lost the war retained the vision. The defeated people would, even in defeat, be more moral, more righteous, more evangelistic, and more orthodox than their northern counterparts ever would be. Williams's book is an insightful analysis of Tichenor's role in promoting that vision."
—The Alabama Review

"Williams provides a balanced biography of a central figure in Baptist and Southern history in the late nineteenth century. Without overlooking his subject's flaws, Williams offers a convincing case that the Southern Baptist Convention owes its existence as a denomination in the wake of the Civil War to the efforts of Isaac Taylor Tichenor in the 1880s and 1890s.”
—The Journal of Religion

"Williams provides a much-needed full biography of Isaac Taylor Tichenor, an important Baptist leader in the late nineteenth century. This interpretive study places Tichenor at the very center of Baptist life in the decades following the Civil War."
—The Journal of Southern History