Lower than the Angels: Racial Jurisprudence and Paternalism in Zion

readers of this journal know that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rendered African Americans second-class citizens until 1978. Whether or not that was a long time ago depends, of course, on your perspective. (It was within my lifetime, and I still suit up for basketball on the weekends.) Yet how and why this happened are poorly understood, according to the authors of this book—and as much by people within the church as by those outside it. In This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle Over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah, a more complicated and ambiguous story emerges.The racial ideology that tainted Mormonism had both deep and shallow causes. The deep causes are familiar to historians of the early United States: White supremacy and capitalist exploitation of Black labor (and subsequent dehumanization of people of African descent) over many generations. Joseph Smith Jr. and his associates were steeped in racial notions they could not find their way out of—not in theology (or revelation) and not in social practice.1 This is unsurprising: Mormonism was an American religion and amply bore the signs of it.The shallow causes are, in many ways, more interesting and, as the authors demonstrate, less well-understood. Scholars are still uncovering the story, which centers around a territorial legislative session in 1852, just four and a half years after overland migrants settled in Salt Lake Valley. The legislators—all members of the LDS Church, most enjoying leadership positions—legalized a form of Black “servitude” that was in some ways unique, at least for enslaved people whose owners followed the law. Some did not; enforcement was practically nonexistent in the far-flung Mormon settler communities of the Intermountain West.2Enslaved peoples’ experiences in Utah Territory varied, though there were never more than a few dozen people held in bondage by Mormon settlers at any time. In 1862, a wartime Congress banned slavery in all US territories, bringing the ten-year “experiment” in Mormon slavery to a close, though actual freedom for bondspeople is poorly documented, as the authors note in a final chapter, titled “Utah's Juneteenth.”The principal aim of this book is to determine how and why Utah adopted slavery and what bondage looked like for African Americans. Despite scarce primary sources (and relatively few enslaved people in the territory), the authors succeed in this goal. Had they stopped there, This Abominable Slavery would already be a formative study. It turns out that the same 1852 legislature debated the rights of Native Americans in the territory during a time when neighboring territories capitalized on the American Indian slave trade or mounted genocidal extermination campaigns endorsed by local authorities.3 Mormon leaders wanted none of this in their Zion. Under the forceful leadership of Brigham Young, the Latter-day Saints initially strove for peaceful relations with local Natives and avoided legislating on either slavery or indentured servitude in their theocratic experiment in the American West. The expectation was that God would chart a new path for his people free of the sins and errors of American society. Surely, Zion would transcend the Indian “problems” of the early United States; surely, degraded enslavers driving their chattels would not find a home among the Saints.The Mormons were mistaken. The first major violence occurred in early 1850 when, after a series of skirmishes, the Nauvoo Legion captured and executed dozens of Timpanogos Utes near Provo. By 1852, territorial leaders could no longer avoid vexing questions about the status of enslaved (and formerly enslaved) people and of noncitizen Native Americans—challenges that had bedeviled the United States since its founding.4 Legislators thus considered both issues simultaneously, shortly after the United States Congress created the Utah Territory as part of the Compromise of 1850. Under the aegis of popular sovereignty, Congress left the question of human bondage up to citizens of the new territories. Congress, that is to say, punted.The result in Utah was unexpected, though hardly outside the American mainstream of ensuring rights for some (but not others) and enshrining private property as fundamental to citizenship and full belonging in society. White men would rule Zion, and they would rule their households (wealthy and high-ranking men would rule multiple households). Non-Whites would serve and be ruled. Black people's presence would be tolerated but not encouraged. A “remnant” of the Native Americans would be saved; the rest would vanish. All this was as God intended—or so said Brigham Young. Like other new religious movements of the Second Great Awakening, the Mormons aspired to utopia. They found themselves in the American West. While church historians and historians of Utah are familiar with the outcomes of the debates over African American slavery and the Indian slave trade, this book taps previously unused sources to illuminate the finer points. During the 1852 legislative session, a secretary took transcription in Pitman shorthand. In the 2010s, following up on research requests placed by historian W. Paul Reeve, archivist LaJean Purcell Carruth of the Church History Library in Salt Lake City began to decipher these documents, constituting this study's principal source base. The legislative notes are revealing, if not game-changing.The legislature itself consisted of thirty-nine men, all Mormons. Neither African Americans nor Native Americans had any say in the legislation that concerned them. Nor, for that matter, did women or non-Mormon White residents of Utah Territory. Thirty of the thirty-nine legislators were from Northern states, shaped by the politics and religious culture of antislavery. Antislavery was not abolition; only the most radical White Americans believed in racial equality. Still, antislavery shaped these politicians in profound ways. For social and cultural reasons, very few church members were in favor of what was known at the time as “property in man,” that is, chattel slavery. However, the handful of legislators from the American South had an outsized influence in the 1852 debates (19).Statehood was another factor. The Latter-day Saints had already petitioned Congress once, in 1849–50. They would try five more times before finally being admitted on their seventh petition in 1890. This was after the church officially disavowed polygamy. But in the early 1850s, staking out a position on slavery—any position—was fraught. This is exactly why Brigham Young avoided it for half a decade.The first third of the book concerns Latter-day Saints’ relationship to African American slavery. In many ways, Utah's approach to race and society in the 1850s looks like the antebellum North of a generation earlier. Smith and Young were already grown men when New York abolished slavery in 1827. Like most Northern states, New York imposed servitude on the children of the formerly enslaved, as part of a broader program of gradual emancipation. But Smith and Young hailed from provincial, rural families with scanty education. (Young himself said that he had logged eleven days of formal schooling.) By the time of his conversion to Mormonism in 1832, the future prophet and second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was behind the times.Changing course, chapters 4 and 5 examine what historian Andrés Reséndez has aptly termed the “other” slavery.5 The authors provide a valuable overview of the trial of New Mexico trader Pedro León Luján, who was arrested in central Utah in 1851, tried in territorial court, and found guilty of human trafficking. As the authors explain, the Luján trial set the stage for legislation to transform Indian captives into indentured servants. For specialists in the Native American West, these chapters cover familiar ground; yet scarcely ever have scholars examined the Act in Relation to Service (Service Act) alongside the Act for the Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners (Indian Indenture Act) and never with this level of detail.6 This is thanks not only to the Pitman shorthand records but also to the authors’ diligent ferreting out of relevant sources. Legislators were thinking simultaneously about a host of forms of unfree labor in 1852, including apprenticeships for White minors. By the conclusion of the legislative session, Mormon leaders had enacted not one but three laws regulating unfree labor in the territory: one for enslaved African Americans, one for Native American indentured servants, and one for White apprentices from the Eastern United States and Western Europe. In the authors’ capable hands, debates on these issues (and legislators’ discussions offline) come alive.Chapter 6 is perhaps the book's principal contribution to scholarship. A deep dive into the Service Act, this chapter builds on significant scholarship authored since the earliest academic studies on race and Mormonism were published, including previous work by the authors.7 Here the authors successfully marshal sources generated by two compelling figures: Brigham Young, who served as territorial governor, superintendent of Indian Affairs, prophet and president of the Church; and Orson Pratt, a legislator and Latter-day Saint apostle. The debates between Young and Pratt produced, at the same time, the most sympathetic statements in favor of the humanity of non-White people (Pratt) and the most racist rhetoric of the early church (Young). Even specialists in the antebellum period will flinch at the racial animus displayed by the Mormon leader. Notably, both men were raised in antislavery upstate New York and deeply invested in their godly society's success in the American West. The short-term result of these debates was compromise. Over the long term, Young's perspective would engulf Pratt's, embedding racial ideology in church doctrine and in Mormon society. The authors neglect to consider how much support Pratt's ideas held in the legislature or broader community. Possibly church hierarchy rendered any such support irrelevant.It is remarkable, as the authors note, that scholars of the antebellum United States have ignored the Service Act. (Its existence was scarcely known in its day, including by many in Utah.) The act is important for at least two reasons. First, it demonstrates the theological and moral dilemma that African American slavery posed to Mormonism. Second, it highlights the variety of approaches to slavery and unfreedom in the West after the Compromise of 1850 established popular sovereignty in the territories. (California prohibited slavery in its constitution of 1849, while New Mexico essentially legalized it a decade later.) The fact that Utah debated chattel slavery at all in 1852 is notable. Only one legislator, House member and Tennessee-born John Brown, owned one enslaved person (19). The total number of enslaved Black people in the Territory in 1851 amounted to fifty-six. Between 1851 and 1862, when Congress abolished slavery in the territories, the number of enslaved people hovered between thirty and forty (6). Other enslaved people passed through the territory with their owners bound for California and other parts of the West. As for Black church members, about twenty people (both free and enslaved) had been baptized in the US before the exodus to the Great Basin.8The authors argue that Utah leaders followed the lead of Northern states in enacting a form of gradual emancipation. In this way, the Service Act (which passed unanimously) was “ultimately designed to elevate enslaved Black people from the status of property to contract servants” (121). This is true to a point; yet Mormon leaders were far more concerned about preventing the dissolution of their godly society, whether on the issue of slavery or for other reasons. Methodists and Baptists had split apart in the 1840s over slavery. As far as Brigham Young was concerned, that would not happen under his watch. Fortunately for Young, early Utah was more theocracy than democracy.Here and elsewhere, the authors push too hard on the notion that the Latter-day Saints sought a real alternative to African American slavery, ensuring the “consent” of those bound to unfree labor. The Utah bill did stipulate educational requirements (no fewer than eighteen months of schooling between the ages of seven and twenty); it protected “servants” from excessive corporal punishment and declined to place restrictions on their owning property or testifying in court. For the authors, all of this proves that the Service Act “unambiguously recognized servants as human beings with personal agency” (127).9 The problem is that enslavers in the American South also convinced themselves that their bondspeople had consented—at some point, in some way—to their bondage. Stemming from Enlightenment political philosophy, consent was the central principle of US representative democracy. Maintaining slavery in such a system required mental gymnastics. But whether in the Mountain West or the Deep South, calling unfree, non-White people “servants” did not make them so. In the case of Utah, stipulating that these “servants” must consent to be relocated out of the territory or sold to another enslaver did not bring about consent. It highlighted its absence.In chapter 7, the Brigham Young–Orson Pratt debate turns to suffrage. While Pratt was in favor of Black male voting rights, Young asserted that African Americans were inferior to Whites and cursed by God, alternately referencing the curses of Cain and Ham from the Book of Genesis. (Joseph Smith had referenced Ham's curse in his Book of Abraham.) Pratt insisted there was no evidence that Black people descended from either Cain or Ham. But Young remained firm: If Black men “cannot bear rule in the church of God, what business have they in bearing rule in the state and government affairs of this territory?” (165). “We just as well make a bill here for mules to vote as Negroes and Indians” (166). Young employed the mule analogy advisedly, parroting race scientists who warned that intermarriage would lead to infertility.10 In this same speech, Young condemned abolitionism and sexual relations across the color line. The moment “we consent to take the seed of Cain, the church must go to destructions” (170–71). Interracial coupling, in the church president's mind, would cause the downfall of Zion. Over the succeeding quarter century, as the authors note, Young “never deviated” from these justifications for African Americans’ subservient status (167): Black people were cursed; intermixing with them would poison the Saints.Three successive chapters focus on the implications of the 1852 legislative debates and the afterlives of both the Service Act and Indian Indenture Act. These pages are some of the most illuminating discussions in the book. Given how few enslaved people lived in Utah during 1852–62, and given how poorly indentured servitude was documented, the authors have done a terrific job bringing these people to life through the thinnest of primary sources. As the authors note, there is still much to learn and many lives to reconstruct. 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