Published in 1965, this biography of Atticus Green Haygood (1839–1896) reveals a man whose personal faith led him to become one of the foremost southern advocates of liberal racial policies. Born in rural northeast Georgia, Haygood attended Emory College at Oxford and went on to lead a distinguished career in the Methodist church, reforming church government, writing tracts on missionary work, and eventually serving as Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Haygood received national recognition for his work as an agent for the Slater Fund, an organization dedicated to supporting education for blacks, and for his controversial book Our Brother in Black, which outlined his views on racial issues. From 1875 to 1884 he served as president of Emory College where he continued his efforts of social reform.

The Gospel Working Up offers a history of three generations of Baptist and Methodist clergymen in nineteenth-century Virginia, and through them of the congregations and communities in which they lived and worked. Schweiger examines the religious experience both before and after the Civil War, showing how Southern Protestantism became an instrument of spiritual, moral, material, and cultural progress.