Jana Dahmer as Miriam Works Young, with John Donovan Wilson as Brigham Young, in “Six Days in August”
By the way, Six Days in August is still playing in four or five theaters through this Thursday, and will survive in two more — in Pocatello and, I believe, in Kaysville — over at least this coming weekend. We’re also arranging some private showings. (My wife and I will be involved with one of those on Sunday next.) Final approval for DVDs and Blu-ray should come today, and we’re moving forward with plans for streaming the film.
Brigham Young, in an unsourced photograph from ca. 1850
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
A few months ago, I read Amy Tanner Thiriot, Slavery in Zion: A Documentary and Genealogical History of Black Lives and Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847-1862 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2023):
Slavery in Zion combines genealogical and historical research to bring to light events and relationships unknown or misunderstood for well over a century. The total number of enslaved people in Utah’s early history has remained an open question for many years, due in part to the nature of nineteenth-century records, and an exact number is undetermined. But while writing this book Thiriot documented around one hundred enslaved or indentured Black men, women, and children in Utah Territory.
Slavery in Zion has two major parts. The first section provides an introductory history, chapters on southern and western experiences, and information on life after emancipation. The second section is a biographical encyclopedia of names, relationships, and events. Although Slavery in Zion contains material applicable to legal history and the history of race and Mormonism, its most important contribution is as an archive of the experiences of Utah’s enslaved Black people, at last making their stories an integral part of the record of Utah and the American West—no longer forgotten or written out of history.
Just today, I finished W. Paul Reeve, Christopher B. Rich Jr., and LaJean Purcell Carruth, This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024):
On July 22, 1847, a group of about forty refugees entered the Salt Lake Valley. Among them were three enslaved men, two of whom shared the religion, Mormonism, that had caused them to flee. The valley was also home to members of the Ute tribe, who would sometimes barter captive women and children to Spanish colonizers. Thus, the question of whether the Latter-day Saints would accept or reject slavery in their new Zion confronted them on the day they first arrived. Five years later, after Utah had become an American territory, its legislature was prodded to take up the question then roiling the nation: would they be slave or free?
George D. Watt, the official reporter for the 1852 legislative session, reported debates and speeches in Pitman shorthand. They remained in their original format, virtually untouched, for more than one hundred and fifty years, until LaJean Purcell Carruth transcribed them. In this eye-opening volume, Carruth, Christopher Rich, and W. Paul Reeve draw extensively on these new sources to chronicle the session, during which the legislature passed two important statutes: one that legally transformed African American slaves into “servants” but did not pass the condition of servitude on to their children and another that authorized twenty-year indentures for enslaved Native Americans.
This Abominable Slavery places these debates within the context of the nation’s growing sectional divide and contextualizes the meaning of these laws in the lives of Black enslaved people and Native American indentured servants. In doing so, it sheds new light on race, religion, slavery, and unfree labor in the antebellum period.
In one of the conversations that ensued upon the appearance of the article by Jana Riess, a vocal critic confidently declared that Brigham Young’s views on race were essentially those of the Nazis.
However, this accusation simply cannot be sustained.
Brigham Young was, very clearly, a racist by ordinary twenty-first century American standards. There can be no serious question about that. But so, arguably, was Abraham Lincoln. And so too, probably, were a large majority of his contemporaries — even among opponents of slavery.
However, his was a paternalistic racism, not the toxic (and genocidally lethal) racism of the Third Reich. And — this will come as a surprise to many, and as an unpleasant shock to more than a few of those who hate the man — Brigham Young opposed slavery. Hoping to avoid conflict, he favored what Reeve, Rich, and Carruth call “gradual emancipation,” as did others across the nation. And his fear of conflict was not misplaced: In 1861, the American Civil War erupted. It eventually killed more than 620,000 people and injured several million more, out of a much smaller American population than today.
I have often seen the claim that, with his strong backing of “An Act in Relation to Service,” which was passed by the 1852 Utah Territorial Legislature, Brigham Young endorsed Black slavery in Zion and established it as both legal and effectively government-approved. I accepted this idea uncritically and without question, and I very much regretted that blight on his historical record. But I now recognize that this is to grossly misunderstand and misrepresent not only that Act of the legislature but Brigham’s reasons for supporting it.
I will probably write more on this subject at some point. In fact, I’m thinking right now of proposing it as at least a substantial part of a presentation for the annual FAIR conference next year, so important do I find what I’ve now learned. In the meantime, as I say, anybody who presumes to pontificate upon the topic of Brigham Young and his attitudes toward people of Black African descent without being thoroughly familiar with the information contained in Slavery in Zion and especially in This Abominable Slavery simply doesn’t deserve a hearing.
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