The priesthood and temple ban against individuals with Black African ancestry is often traced to Brigham Young, who announced the policy during an 1852 legislative session in Utah Territory. That announcement happened in the midst of a debate over how to legislate unfree labor, including slavery of Black and indigenous peoples in the territory. In this interview, W. Paul Reeve and Christopher B. Rich discuss the history of unfree labor in Utah Territory.
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Read more about the history of Slavery in Utah in This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah.
What is This Abominable Slavery about?
This Abominable Slavery is about Utah Territory’s answer to the fraught question tearing at the fabric of union in the 1850s: Could human beings be held as property?
A majority of northerners said “no,” that holding human beings as property was a violation of the founding principles of the nation. Southern enslavers countered that human being could be held as property and that the Constitution protected their property rights.
An all Latter-day Saint territorial legislature met in 1852 to address the same question. They did so in relation to both African American and Native American enslaved people who already lived in the territory.
The book contextualizes the debates that took place that legislative session and the bills that lawmakers passed. It also situates the beginnings of racial priesthood and temple restrictions in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints within that same context. It focuses most closely on the ten-year time span, from 1852 to 1862, when the Black “servant” code and Native American indenture bill were in effect (although the final chapter notes that the end of those bills was ambiguous in practice). It also attempts to understand what the passage of the servant code and Native American indenture bill meant in the lives of those who the new laws influenced most, enslaved African American and Native American women and men.
Even though the laws that territorial lawmakers passed granted enslaved people some rights, it was not enough for Latter-day Saint apostle and territorial legislator Orson Pratt. He argued against both bills and described them as enacting differing versions of “this abominable slavery.”
What new sources became available during research for this book?
Legislators elected Latter-day Saint convert George D. Watt as reporter for the 1852 legislative session. Watt captured in Pitman shorthand (a nineteenth-century version of shorthand that allowed recorders to write speeches nearly verbatim) many of the debates and speeches from that legislative session but did not transcribe them into longhand. They were not published in the Deseret News or Journal of Discourses but sat in Watt’s collection un-transcribed for more than 150 years.
Research for Religion of a Different Color led to the discovery of a Pitman shorthand file from the 1852 legislative session in Watt’s collection. LaJean Purcell Carruth transcribed that file into longhand in 2013 and thereby produced a torrent of new evidence regarding race, slavery, religion, and politics in nineteenth-century Utah. Following additional inquires from Christopher Rich, Carruth also transcribed the shorthand minutes of the 1856 Utah constitutional convention (the second time that Utah territory applied for statehood). Southerner Seth Blair proposed that Utah’s application be sent to Washington D.C. as a slave state, an idea soundly defeated at the convention.
This Abominable Slavery is thus based on a flood of new evidence to which no prior scholar had access. Among the new evidence now publicly available are debates over the Native American indenture bill, debates over the Black servant code, disagreement over Utah’s election bill (Orson Pratt proposed that Black men be allowed to vote in 1852, something Brigham Young rejected outright), and two strident antislavery speeches which Orson Pratt delivered.
All of the primary source documents on which the book is based are now publicly available (with cooperation from the Church History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) at a Marriott Library webpage at the University of Utah: www.ThisAbominableSlavery.org.
What types of unfree labor did Brigham Young and other Latter-day Saints experience before settling in the Intermountain West?
Unfree labor is a form of work in which a servant and a master enter into an employment relationship and the servant is not legally free to leave the relationship until certain conditions are fulfilled. In contrast, free labor is a form of work in which an employee may quit the employment relationship at any time.
After the Revolutionary War, the United States slowly moved toward a free labor system. But when Brigham Young and other Latter-day Saint leaders were growing-up, various forms of unfree labor were still quite common.
For example, many of these men personally served as apprentices, a status in which children were indentured to a craftsman to be educated in a particular occupation. Brigham Young was apprenticed at least twice during his teenage years. Orphans and poor children could be involuntarily apprenticed by the state as a form of social welfare. Some Europeans still came to the United States as indentured servants. Local municipalities could also indenture criminals and debtors to pay off their obligations.
Brigham Young insisted that neither African Americans nor Native Americans could be held as slaves.
Slavery was the most extreme form of unfree labor. In other types of unfree labor, the labor of a servant was considered property. As a result, the labor of a servant could potentially be sold to a third party. However, in a slavery relationship, the enslaved person was considered property.
Surprisingly, even Latter-day Saints who lived in the North were familiar with slavery. After the Revolution, a number of northern states initiated gradual emancipation laws that were designed to abolish slavery over time. This was the case in New York where Joseph Smith and Brigham Young lived.
These laws provided that the children of enslaved people who were born after a certain date would be free. Even so, these children could be held as servants until their mid to late twenties. When Brigham Young was serving as an apprentice in Auburn, New York, it is likely that he knew African Americans in a variety of legal statuses including slave, servant, and free. Slavery was not finally abolished in New York until 1827.
Why did Latter-day Saints purchase Native American children?
When the Latter-day Saints first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, there was already a long-standing trade in Native American children between the Western Ute and merchants in New Mexico. Sometimes Utes attacked a Paiute band and stole the children, and sometimes they negotiated a sale. The Ute saw the Latter-day Saints as a new market for these children.
Frequently the Ute would threaten to kill the children if the Latter-day Saints refused to buy them. For instance, within months of the Saints’ arrival, a Ute name Batiste brought two children to sell, a boy and a teenage girl. When the Latter-day Saints refused to buy the children, Batiste killed the boy. Charles Decker (Brigham Young’s brother-in-law) subsequently purchased the girl. Thus, the Latter-days Saints often bought Indigenous children to save them from death, or from being sold as slaves into New Mexico.
While these humanitarian motivations always remained important, Latter-day Saints also began to purchase Indian children directly from their parents. Partly this was an effort to acculturate Native children and “redeem the Lamanites” according to Mormon theology. Sometimes it was an attempt to save a child from poverty. Yet some Latter-day Saints probably bought Indian children as a cheap source of labor.
What was the Trial of Don Pedro León Luján and how did it affect the legislative session in 1852?
In the late fall of 1851, a Latter-day Saint posse in central Utah arrested a group of New Mexican traders led by Don Pedro León Luján. The Latter-day Saints accused Luján and his companions of illegally engaging in the slave trade with members of the Ute tribe. Luján’s subsequent trials both preceded and overlapped with the start of the 1852 legislative session.
Several people who were involved with the trials also served as lawmakers. Luján’s trials thus formed the most immediate context for the legislative session and created the impetus and produced the rationale for passage of the Black servant code and Native American indenture bill.
What types of unfree labor did legislators in Utah Territory try to regulate in 1852?
The members of the 1852 territorial legislature attempted to regulate a wide spectrum of unfree labor. Most importantly, the legislators wished to regulate African American slavery and Native American slavery. Brigham Young insisted that neither African Americans nor Native Americans could be held as slaves.
In other words, they could not be owned as property. However, he argued that “servitude” was an appropriate status between immediate abolition and chattel slavery. Young likely thought of servitude as being something like a long-term apprenticeship.
One of the laws that the legislature enacted, An Act in Relation to Service, was very similar to an Illinois statute which permitted masters to bring enslaved people into the state as long as their legal status was changed to indentured or registered servant and their children freed after a defined period of servitude.
At the same time, the Utah legislature also authorized a form of indentured servitude for European immigrants who were indebted to the Perpetual Emigrating Fund or to private lenders. The legislature also authorized voluntary and involuntary apprenticeships for children, and authorized forms of servitude for vagrants and criminals.
What did Brigham Young think about chattel slavery?
Brigham Young believed that chattel slavery was both legally and morally wrong. In January 1852, he told the territorial legislature that “human flesh to be dealt in as property, is not consistent or compatible with the true principles of government.”
Young also believed that slavery was disastrous as an economic system. However, Young did not object to various forms of unfree labor such as apprenticeship or indentured servitude. These did not reduce a person to property, and generally involved some level of consent on the part of the servant.
It was the only rationale Young offered for the racial priesthood restriction and Pratt rejected it.
Despite this, Young occasionally made comments that made it appear that he supported slavery. On one occasion, Young told the legislature, “Inasmuch as I believe in [the] Bible…I believe in slavery.”
Young’s statements on the subject can be difficult to reconcile with one another. But it is important to understand that Young did not always use precise legal terminology. He sometimes used the terms “servitude” and “slavery” synonymously, while at other times he made a bright line distinction between them.
Despite these rhetorical challenges, Brigham Young consistently maintained that people should not be treated as property, that the legislature should not legalize chattel slavery, and that Utah would be a free state when it was admitted to the Union.
What reasons did Brigham Young give for opposing immediate abolition?
Brigham Young was primarily concerned with the conflict that immediate abolition provoked. While he argued that it was morally wrong to treat a person as property, he understood that enslaved people represented a sizeable investment for their owners and that enslavers would resist attempts to free their slaves outright.
He believed that arguments over abolition were both divisive and dangerous. In fact, three major denominations, the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists, had all split over the question of abolition and slavery. He saw this potential even among the Latter-day Saints. At one point, he told the legislature that:
[Many] brethren in the south [have means vested in slaves]. Those of their servants want to come here, [but] when they come here, the devil [is] raised. This one talking, that one talking, [and a] strong abolitionist feeling [prevails with some people] whispering etc.
Brigham Young
Young argued that the best policy was to buy enslaved people from their masters and then free them, and complained that immediate abolitionists refused to do so. In fact, Young personally followed his own advice. In the early 1850s, he purchased or rented the labor of an enslaved man named Green Flake, and then freed him and two other enslaved women.
He believed that a slow transition was best.
At the same time, Young worried that immediate emancipation would cause serious social problems if enslaved people were suddenly freed without a proper education or means of support. They might become paupers or even criminals. Young grew up in a gradual emancipation state and believed that a slow transition from slavery to freedom was best.
Young further contended that what abolitionists really wanted was complete racial equality and race-mixing, two concepts that he vigorously opposed.
Finally, Young believed that the abolitionist attack on slavery was intertwined with an attack on polygamy. The Republican Party made this explicit in 1856 when their platform called for the eradication of the “twin relics of barbarism,” polygamy and slavery. He therefore attacked abolitionists and their policies partly as a way to defend polygamy.
How did Orson Pratt’s views differ from Brigham Young’s?
Theologically Orson Pratt defined people of Black African descent as “innocent,” while Brigham Young described them as inherently guilty.
Young relied on the Curse of Cain (that Cain killed his brother Abel and therefore was marked with black skin and cursed from the priesthood) and the curse of Ham or Canaan, that Black people were cursed to be “servant of servants” to white people.
Brigham Young’s version violated the second Article of Faith in Latter-day Saint teachings, that human beings are punished for their own sins and not for Adam’s transgression. Young’s version of the curse of Cain held the supposed descendants of Cain responsible for a murder in which they took no part. Pratt argued that there was “no proof” that Black people are descendants of Cain.
It was the only rationale Young offered for the racial priesthood restriction and Pratt rejected it.
In terms of unfree labor, Brigham Young looked backward to the various unfree labor categories with which he grew up; Orson Pratt, in contrast represented the free labor ethic that was then on its way in across the nation.
Pratt equated both the Native American indenture bill and the Black servant code with slavery and wanted them both rejected. Passing the Black servant code was “enough to cause the angels in heaven to blush,” Pratt argued. Pratt also advocated for Black male voting rights. Young rejected that idea and said, “[We] just [as well] make [a] bill here for mules to vote as Negroes [and] Indians.”
How did the 1852 laws in Utah about unfree labor compare with others?
All of the states and territories organized from the Mexican Cession faced similar problems when it came to the regulation of labor. California, New Mexico, and Utah all had preexisting forms of unfree labor that were practiced by Native and Hispanic residents. In addition, migrants from the American South brought enslaved African Americans into the region.
Although California was ostensibly a free state, hundreds of enslaved people labored in the gold fields and pro-slavery Southerners formed a powerful faction in the state government. As a result, the California legislature passed statutes which functionally permitted slavery until the mid-1850s. In addition, enslavers entered into indenture contracts with their slaves in which they promised to work for a certain period of time in exchange for their freedom. These were typically short and lasted from a few months to a few years. California also authorized several types of unfree labor for Native Americans including a form of apprenticeship or indentured servitude that could last for up to 25 years.
The priesthood restriction was in operation before the legislative session began.
New Mexico had only a small number of enslaved African Americans, but it passed an explicit slave code in 1859 that was based on the laws of Mississippi. New Mexico likewise legalized peonage, or debt servitude. Although it was never enshrined in law, New Mexicans also practiced rescate or redemption, a practice in which Indigenous women and children who were purchased from Native enslavers would perform unfree labor for 10-20 years.
The Utah statute governing apprenticeships for Native American children was similar to practices in California and New Mexico. It permitted up to 20 years of unfree labor, but also included education requirements and freedom dues. Many Utah legislators argued that it was comparable to apprenticeship requirements for white children.
Unlike California and New Mexico, the Utah legislature never authorized chattel slavery for Africans Americans. Instead, An Act in Relation to Service legalized a form of “servitude.” The law stated that African American servants must consent to their residence in Utah, that they could not be “transferred” (sold) to a new master without consent, and they could not be removed from the Territory without their consent.
Brigham Young may have thought in those terms.
Brigham Young saw the relationship as contractual and insisted that if the contract was broken through abuse or some other incident, the servant should go free the “same as white folks.” The law also included education requirements for children. The law gave no maximum period of service, which meant that it could potentially last for the lifetime of the servant. However, the legislature removed language from the statute which would have made servitude heritable. In other words, servitude could not pass on to the children of servants and the law created a form of gradual emancipation.
An Act in Relation to Service was significantly different from the gradual emancipation laws in New York, although Brigham Young may have thought in those terms. It was comparable to laws that had previously existed in Indiana and Illinois with which the Saints were familiar. These statutes permitted enslavers to bring their slaves into the state as long as they entered into an indenture contract which legally transformed the enslaved person into a servant. There was no maximum service requirement, so these service relationships could potentially last for the lifetime of the servant.
Most contracts stipulated a period of service lasting several decades, however. In addition, the law stipulated that the children of African American servants would be freed after a specified period of service. As in Utah, this was a practical form of gradual emancipation. While the Utah law was similar in many ways, it contained fewer details and was written with less precision. It is not clear if it was written vaguely on purpose, or if this was simply an example of bad draftsmanship.
How did the 1852 legislative session relate to the temple and priesthood ban?
The legislative session produced the first public articulations of the priesthood restriction by a prophet/president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The priesthood restriction was in operation before the legislative session began, but that session offers scholars the first public articulations of a rationale for the restriction. Latter-day Saints then began to speak openly about the priesthood restriction as it developed into a corresponding temple restriction.
Following the legislative session, at least five Latter-day Saint newspapers mention and defend the priesthood restriction in the 1850s. Willard Richards, Brigham Young’s counselor in the First Presidency, weighed in first with an article in the Deseret News, within a month of lawmaking session’s end. “Cain and his posterity must wear the mark which God put upon them,” Richards insisted. Even if white people “wash the race of Cain with fuller’s soap every day they cannot wash away God’s mark.”
Congress and Abraham Lincoln would ultimately outlaw slavery and involuntary servitude in all U.S. territories, including Utah, in 1862, but the racial restrictions would drag on for almost 130 years. The restrictions thus became the lasting legacy of the heated debates of that decade and continue to reverberate to the present.
What do you hope people take away from This Abominable Slavery?
It is our hope that people are able to situate Utah Territory within a larger national framework. The questions that lawmakers, religious leaders, and everyday Utahns grappled with over slavery and unfree labor in the 1850s ultimately dragged the nation into war by 1861.
Both Native American and African American slavery existed in Utah Territory and this book attempts to explain the complex and nuanced answers that lawmakers created to address them. It also attempts to understand how the laws that legislators passed played out in the lives of the Native American and African American enslaved.
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About the interview participants
W. Paul Reeve is the Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies in the History Department at the University of Utah where he teaches courses on Utah history, Mormon history, and the history of the U.S. West. He is Project Manager and General Editor of a digital database, Century of Black Mormons, designed to name and identify all known Black Mormons baptized into the faith between 1830 and 1930. He is widely recognized as one of today’s foremost authorities on race and priesthood in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Christopher B. Rich is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. He holds a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law and an LL.M. from the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School. He served for 11 years in the U.S. Army JAG Corps before transitioning to the Reserves. He has published award-winning articles in the fields of National Security Law and 19th century Latter-day Saint history.
Further Reading
- What Did Brigham Young Say About the Mark of Cain?
- What Is the History of the Revelation on the Priesthood?
- Who Was Wakara?
- How Has the Book of Mormon Influenced Race Discussions?
- How Did Race Factor into Pioneer-Era Latter-day Saint Settlement and Missionary Work?
Utah Slavery Resources
- This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah (Oxford University Press)
- Slavery and Abolition (Gospel Topics Essay)
- A Peculiar Place for the Peculiar Institution: Slavery and Sovereignty in Early Territorial Utah (BYU)
- 1852 Legislative Session: This Abominable Slavery (University of Utah)
- Slavery in Utah: Primary Resources (Mormonr)
