This Abominable Slavery: A Review

This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah by W. Paul Reeve, Christopher B. Rich Jr., and LaJean Purcell Carruth is a fascinating and detailed glimpse into the debates about slavery and race in Utah Territory in the 1850s. Incorporating never-before transcribed accounts of the 1852 legislative session that saw Utah Territory leadership pass a series of laws intended to regulate unfree labor, this volume provides a thorough analysis of those laws, the debates that surrounded them and how they fit into the national context of the United States at the time. In doing so, the book also offers insights into the early development of the priesthood and temple ban against individuals with Black African ancestry in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The context around the 1852 laws introduced in Utah Territory provided in This Abominable Slavery gives much more nuance than I’ve seen before. It makes the case that legislators and President Brigham Young were seeking a moderate approach towards regulating and ending slavery in the Territory through following laws and practices they learned about in New York, Indiana, and Illinois. The choices they made still disadvantaged Black and Native American individuals held in bondage in Utah to maintain unity with a minority of white members with southern origins, but the legislators saw a distinction between chattel slavery (in which humans were treated as property) and servitude (which was seen as a contractual arrangement similar to an apprenticeship). The laws that they passed to regulate servitude were, in many ways, more humane than those passed in other territories carved out of the Mexican Cession by the United States.

The most detailed analysis was reserved for Brigham Young’s position on the matter. While John G. Turner stated that Brigham Young’s stance on slavery as a “bundle of contradictions,” the authors of This Abominable Slavery note that “a rough consistency can be discerned within his jumbled philosophy” (p. 79) and “in his stance on slavery, he remained remarkably consistent throughout the decade. Like several Protestant moderates of his day, Young attempted to thread a needle between what he considered the sin of holding people as property and the confrontational tactics of immediate abolitionists” (214). Indeed, based on what I’ve read before, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that “Young was clear that he opposed the idea of property in man and refused to allow human beings to be either categorized or treated as chattel” (217). At the same time, there was “an underlying racism that animated his views” and “Young refused to see Black people as equal to white people” (pp. 217–218). One reason for this was that “he fully believed in the curse of Canaan dogma, here conflated with the curse of Ham. Moreover, Young expressly connected the curse with servitude for people of African descent”, which “was entirely unexceptional.” Servitude, in this case, was “best described as subordination or dependence,” rather than chattel slavery—a “kind of public guardianship” or “quasi-dependent status in relationship to white people” that led to Young advocating for a type of benevolent paternalism (p. 79). That belief in the curse of Cain/Canaan/Ham and refusal to see Black people as equal to White (along with fears of multiracial offspring resulting from mixed-race unions) played into his solidification of the nascent priesthood and temple ban during his 1852 speeches to the legislature.

W. Paul Reeve was already involved in research for this book when he was asked to work on Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood, so there is some commonality between the two. For example, when I reviewed Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood, I mentioned that it offered some information of which I was not aware, such as the extent to which Orson Pratt opposed slavery in Utah Territory. That information was based on the transcription of the 1852 legislative session that LaJean Purcell Carruth provided (available now in a Collection at University of Utah) when Reeve was looking for information for This Abominable Slavery. The use of these transcriptions provides a clearer view into what Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, and their colleagues actually said (offering some correction to previous discussions that are based on more incomplete audits of the discussions, like Wilford Woodruff’s journals).

I have no hesitation in recommending reading This Abominable Slavery. It is a well-researched, well-written analysis of racial attitudes and legislation in Utah Territory during the 1850s that provides important insight into the intentions, beliefs, and practices of Latter-day Saint leadership towards Native American and Black individuals. In so doing, it will be a touchstone for studies into the early development of the priesthood and temple ban. When put alongside Second-Class Saints, I would say that Oxford University Press has published some of the most important studies into the subject of the priesthood and temple ban to date over the course of this year.