Review
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Title: This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle Over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah
Authors: W. Paul Reeve, Christopher B. Rich Jr,. and LaJean Purcell Carruth
Year Published: 2024
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: History
Format: Hardback
ISDN: 9780197765029
Price: $33.20
Pages: 298
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters
In the fall of 1852, Haden Church crossed the plains to settle in Utah, bringing with him a Black slave known only as Tom. Shortly thereafter, Church sold Tom to Salt Lake City Mayor Abraham Smoot for whom he labored until his death in 1862. Tom died not knowing that as a slave entering the Utah Territory, his legal status was no longer as a slave but as an indentured servant who had the right to vote and to consent to his transfer of servitude from Church to Smoot. In effect, although the territorial legislature banned slavery and set up various levels of servitude in 1852, Tom’s actual status and living conditions were not noticeably different than that of slaves in the antebellum South.
This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah by co-authors Paul Reeve, Christopher Rich, and LaJean Carruth is the best of history, going far beyond the typical questions of what happened to explain the more important questions of how and why. Utilizing recently transcribed accounts of the 1852 Utah Territorial Legislature, the authors reveal the complexity of Utah slavery during the challenging years leading up to the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. Beyond just the question of Black slavery, Utah’s settlers were also dealing with the violence of Indian slave trading and issues of apprenticeships and voluntary servitude.
As Reeve and his co-authors relate, the problems surrounding Black Slavery were complicated by abolitionist pioneers from New England, wealthy converts from the South who held slaves as property, and an 1852 federal law banning slavery in the territories unless approved by the territorial legislatures. In addition, Indian slave traders had been active in the Great Basin long before the Saints arrived in 1847. Within months of the pioneer’s arrival, an Indian named Baptiste offered two teenage Indian slaves to Charles Decker, a son-in-law to Brigham Young. When the offer was rebuffed, Baptiste immediately killed one captive, prompting Decker to purchase the other. Such scenes played out far too often, prompting a need for a resolution to the Indian slave trade. Add to this that many of the new arrivals in Utah financed their travel using the Perpetual Emigration Fund. Upon arrival in Utah Territory, they found themselves in an economy where cash was almost non-existent, forcing them into a form of servitude to repay their debts to the Fund.
The 1852 session of the Utah Territorial Legislature then became a focal point for the debate over slavery and servitude as they grappled with the underlying realities of the problem. As most members of the legislature were also leaders in the LDS church, the debates took on a theological as well as political slant. Brigham Young often found himself arguing with apostle Orson Pratt and other church leaders over the status of Blacks in the church.
Eventually, the legislature passed two laws, one outlawing slavery and regulating various forms of servitude and another to specifically address the matter of Indian slave trading. Both laws attempted to regulate servitude by requiring slaves brought to Utah and also purchased Indian slaves to be registered as servants via a process involving probate courts and the consent of those entering such arrangements. They also regulated all persons who entered into servitude and apprenticeship arrangements.
On February 5, 1852, the day after the two laws had been passed, Brigham Young took the opportunity of addressing the issues of race and slavery in theological terms, a speech that the authors argue is “perhaps the most important speech [Young] ever gave.” [p161] In that speech, never published in the Journal of Discourses or the Deseret News, Young laid out his views on race and the priesthood that had held implications reaching down into the 21st Century. Wilford Woodruff made notes that covered only a fraction of the speech and with some inaccuracies. In Young’s speech, only recently transcribed from George Watt’s unique version of Pitman shorthand, the Church President and Territorial Governor claimed that Blacks were of the seed of Cain and thus were cursed to be servants and could not hold the church’s priesthood, nor serve in civic leadership. Young’s views on the “Curse of Cain” were adapted from the standard theories of race in Jacksonian America but took on extra theological weight when Young declared, “If they cannot bear rule in the church of God, what business have they in bearing rule in the state and government of this territory?” [165]
As noted in the case of the slave Tom mentioned above, while laws had been implemented and a process put in place to regulate a post-slavery environment, the law was not well known and frequently ignored, nor were penalties applied to those who violated the provisions of the laws. When the U.S. Congress banned slavery outright in the territories in 1862, the relative isolation of Utah and its remoteness still made the transition an uneven and inconsistent process. Even with a relatively small number of slaves in the territory, such examples as Tom’s were not uncommon.
In This Abominable Slavery, Reeve and his co-authors have delivered a hugely important contribution to our understanding of slavery and the beginnings of the temple/priesthood ban. There are lessons to be learned here regarding how we relate to the intersection of history and religion. The past is always seen through a murky lens, but works such as This Abominable Slavery go a long way in providing much-needed clarity on both our past and the present.