Slavery is one of the darkest subjects in the history of the United States. It was an issue that impacted so many lives (in ways that echo through to the present day) and arguments over it tore the nation apart. Utah Territory was no different in that they were caught in intense debates over the morality of the practice and what to do about it. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, W. Paul Reeve and Christopher B. Rich discussed the history of unfree labor and slavery in Utah Territory, building on their recently published book, This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah. What follows here is a copost to the full interview
There is a lot of context to consider in what legislators in Utah decided to do in regard to slavery in 1852. One part of the picture is understanding the range of types of unfree labor with which Latter-day Saints had experience:
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.
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.
In addition, while states in the north were regarded as free, many of them had enacted gradual emancipation measures rather than immediate emancipation, as we might assume from today’s perspective:
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. …
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.
Thus, while Utah allowed for forms of unfree labor, their approach to the subject more closely mirrored the ostensibly free states of the north rather than slave states in the south.
Brigham Young had a major role in shaping the legislation with his views. He didn’t agree with immediate emancipation, and “believed that arguments over abolition were both divisive and dangerous.” But he also didn’t agree with the idea of treating humans as property:
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. …
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.
President Young’s intention was to create a system of unfree labor that allowed gradual emancipation while not treating people as property.
One aspect of the issue that is important to keep in mind is that slavery was not limited to African Americans in the western United States. There was a large slave trade for Native Americans, which the Utes had a huge part of operating in Utah and New Mexico:
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.
This provided another area in which Latter-day Saint legislators in Utah worked to rein in through legislation 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.
The 1852 legislation regulated both African American and Native American slavery (along with unfree labor practices for European immigrants).
Not everyone agreed with the choices being made. Orson Pratt, in particular, was strongly opposed to legalizing any form of unfree labor:
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.
While Pratt’s objections were ultimately overridden, they did provoke some changes to the laws that offered greater protection to the affected peoples.
While most of this became moot in a decade, there was one legacy of these debates that lingered for decades to come:
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. …
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.
That is one of several reasons why 1852 is my least favorite year of church history (along with the official announcement of plural marriage and the Adam-God doctrine).
For more on slavery in Utah Territory, head on over to the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk to read the full interview with W. Paul Reeve and Christopher B. Rich. While you’re there, check out the new Heber J. Grant quotes page!
I had learned about the indentured servant situation in Utah before. I know some people with modern morals will use it as a sign of the church being not of God, but I felt that it did look like church leadership was trying to phase it out. I hadn’t considered that contemporary governments were doing the same, and establishing a pattern they could follow. Very informative, thank you.