{"id":107917,"date":"2024-11-20T11:52:03","date_gmt":"2024-11-20T18:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=107917"},"modified":"2024-11-20T23:02:13","modified_gmt":"2024-11-21T06:02:13","slug":"these-books-have-really-changed-my-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2024\/11\/these-books-have-really-changed-my-mind.html","title":{"rendered":"These books have really changed my mind"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Doomed<\/a>
Jana Dahmer as Miriam Works Young, with John Donovan Wilson as Brigham Young, in \u201cSix Days in August\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By the way, Six Days in August<\/em> is still playing in four or five theaters through this Thursday, and will survive in two more \u2014 in Pocatello and, I believe, in Kaysville \u2014 over at least this coming weekend. \u00a0We\u2019re also arranging some private showings. \u00a0(My wife and I will be involved with one of those on Sunday next.) \u00a0Final approval for DVDs and Blu-ray should come today, and we\u2019re moving forward with plans for streaming the film.<\/p>\n

\"BY,<\/a>
Brigham Young, in an unsourced photograph from ca. 1850
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A few months ago, I read Amy Tanner Thiriot,\u00a0Slavery in Zion: A Documentary and Genealogical History of Black Lives and Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847-1862<\/em> (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2023):<\/span><\/p>\n

Slavery in Zion<\/span><\/em>\u00a0combines 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Slavery in Zion<\/span><\/em> 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<\/span><\/em> contains material applicable to legal history and the history of race and Mormonism<\/a>, its most important contribution is as an archive of the experiences of Utah\u2019s enslaved Black people, at last making their stories an integral part of the record of Utah and the American West\u2014no longer forgotten or written out of history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just today, I finished\u00a0W. Paul Reeve, <\/span><\/span><\/span>Christopher B. Rich Jr., and <\/span><\/span><\/span>LaJean Purcell Carruth,\u00a0<\/span>This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024):<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

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?<\/p>\n

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 \u201cservants\u201d but did not pass the condition of servitude on to their children and another that authorized twenty-year indentures for enslaved Native Americans.<\/p>\n

This Abominable Slavery <\/span><\/em>places these debates within the context of the nation\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/i>Although this was hardly their main focus, these two books, taken together, have fundamentally transformed my understanding of Brigham Young and his views on Blacks of African descent. \u00a0\u00a0 Nobody should speak or write on the subject without being aware of the information contained in them. \u00a0Period.<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
If I had to recommend just one of the two, I would choose This Abominable Slavery, <\/em>although it was Slavery in Zion<\/em> that really began to liberate me from the preconceptions under which I had labored for decades. (<\/a>I should also mention Christopher Rich\u2019s 2012 article [Christopher B. Rich, Jr. \u201cThe True Policy for Utah: Servitude, Slavery, and \u2018An Act in Relation to Service,'\u201d Utah Historical Quarterly<\/i> 80\/1], which, even earlier, opened my mind a bit and which partially undergirds his book with Dr. Reeve and Dr. Purcell.<\/span><\/a>)<\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Recently, with an irresponsible and inflammatory article about the reelection of Mr. Donald J. Trump to the presidency, Jana Riess unleashed a flood of comparisons of Latter-day Saints to Nazis. \u00a0(See her \u201cDear Mormons, our history of worrying about \u2018impure blood\u2019 doesn\u2019t end well: Latter-day Saints are once again on the wrong side of justice, the wrong side of the gospel and the wrong side of history.\u201d<\/a> \u00a0Compare it to the much more solidly grounded articles by Josh Coates and Stephen Smoot, \u201cNewly published Nazi archives reveal the regime\u2019s disdain for the Church of Jesus Christ: Nearly 500 pages of Gestapo files detail Nazi surveillance on Latter-day Saints and the quiet resistance of German members,\u201d<\/a> and by Stephen Cranney and Jacob Hess, \u201cTo understand Latter-day Saint views on immigration, look at all the data: Surveys over the last decade consistently show Latter-day Saints expressing more positivity and compassion on immigration compared with other groups.\u201d<\/a>)<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
In one of the conversations that ensued upon the appearance of the article by Jana Riess, a vocal critic confidently declared that Brigham Young\u2019s views on race were essentially those of the Nazis.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
However, this accusation simply cannot be sustained.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Brigham Young was, very clearly, a racist by ordinary twenty-first century American standards. \u00a0There can be no serious question about that. \u00a0But so, arguably, was Abraham Lincoln. \u00a0And so too, probably, were a large majority of his contemporaries \u2014 even among opponents of slavery.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
However, his was a paternalistic racism, not the toxic (and genocidally lethal) racism of the Third Reich. \u00a0And \u2014 this will come as a surprise to many, and as an unpleasant shock to more than a few of those who hate the man \u2014 Brigham Young opposed slavery<\/em>. \u00a0Hoping to avoid conflict, he favored what Reeve, Rich, and Carruth call \u201cgradual emancipation,\u201d as did others across the nation. \u00a0And his fear of conflict was not misplaced: \u00a0In 1861, the American Civil War erupted. \u00a0It eventually killed more than 620,000 people and injured several million more, out of a much smaller American population than today.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
I have often seen the claim that, with his strong backing of \u201cAn Act in Relation to Service,\u201d 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. \u00a0I accepted this idea uncritically and without question, and I very much regretted that blight on his historical record. \u00a0But I now recognize that this is to grossly misunderstand and misrepresent not only that Act of the legislature but Brigham\u2019s reasons for supporting it.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
I will probably write more on this subject at some point. \u00a0In fact, I\u2019m 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\u2019ve now learned. \u00a0In 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<\/em> and especially in This Abominable Slavery<\/em> simply doesn\u2019t deserve a hearing.<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 By the way, Six Days in August is still playing in four or five theaters through this Thursday, and will survive in two more \u2014 in Pocatello and, I believe, in Kaysville \u2014 over at least this coming weekend. \u00a0We\u2019re also arranging some private showings. \u00a0(My wife and I will be involved with one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":19441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8463,7872,292,788,27765,3703],"class_list":["post-107917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-african","tag-black","tag-brigham-young","tag-mormon","tag-paul-reeve","tag-slavery"],"yoast_head":"\nThese books have really changed my mind<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"  By the way, Six Days in August is still playing in four or five theaters through this Thursday, and 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