It is no exaggeration, no act of excessive pride on the part of any Latter-day Saint, to say that Latter-day Saint leader Brigham Young is one of the most important men in American history. Historian J. David Pulsipher once remarked to me about what he called the “donut hole” style in which the history of the American West is told. We talk about what happened in California, the Northwest, and on the Great Plains, but often vigorously ignore the area in between, the part filled with the Latter-day Saints. Whether intentionally or ignorantly done, this empty “donut hole” in the center of American history in the West leaves not only the general public, but also the Latter-day Saints, often very ignorant of the large impact the Latter-day Saints had in settling the American West. This in turn has led to a lack of appreciation by most Americans, including the Latter-day Saints, for the role the Latter-day Saints have played in American history.
The Latter-day Saints, driven from the United States at the point of the bayonet and under threat of extermination, arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, which was then part of Mexico, in 1847. Led by Brigham Young, the refugee Saints immediately began to settle the area, building homes and founding farms to feed not just themselves but the thousands they knew would be arriving shortly. By the time of Brigham’s death, church membership had tripled from 35,000 in 1844 to more than 115,000 by 1877 and settlements had been founded in what are now the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona and New Mexico. Dr. Leonard Arrington, author of the biography Brigham Young: American Moses explained the influence of both the Latter-day Saints on the American West and Brigham Young’s leadership this way:
With thousands of Saints arriving from the eastern United States and Europe, colonization demanded Brigham Young’s attention. Under his direction, four kinds of colonies were established: first, settlements intended to be temporary places of gathering and recruitment, such as Carson Valley in Nevada; second, colonies to serve as centers for production, such as iron at Cedar City, cotton at St. George, cattle in Cache Valley, and sheep in Spanish Fork, all in Utah; third, colonies to serve as centers for proselytizing and assisting Indians, as at Harmony in southern Utah, Las Vegas in southern Nevada, Lemhi in northern Idaho, and present-day Moab in eastern Utah; fourth, permanent colonies in Utah and nearby states and territories to provide homes and farms for the hundreds of new immigrants arriving each summer. Within ten years, nearly 100 colonies had been planted; by 1867, more than 200; and by the time of his death in 1877, nearly 400 colonies. Clearly, he was one of America’s greatest colonizers.
Everywhere the Latter-day Saints settled they transformed the area around them, often remaking arid lands, such as in southern Utah, southern Arizona, southern Nevada, and southern California, into successful and lush farming communities. At the same time, Latter-day Saints were instrumental in helping to build the Transcontinental Railroad. Brigham was one of the earliest boosters of the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR), buying $5000 in stock before construction ever began. Counter to the myth that the Saints sought isolation in the West, Brigham led the drive to get the railroad to come through Utah, saying:
“Hurry up, hasten the work! We want to hear the iron horse puffing through this valley. What for? To bring our brethren and sisters here. It opens to us the market, and we are at the door of New York, right at the threshold of the emporium of the United States. We can send our butter, eggs, cheese and fruits, and receive in return oysters, clams, cod fish, mackerel, oranges and lemons.”
And Latter-day Saint workers were sought for and highly appreciated during the construction of the railroad. Grenville Dodge, chief engineer for the Union Pacific, explained why, saying that unlike the rowdy “Hell on wheels” camps working for the UPRR elsewhere, the Saints were “teetotalers to the last man, tolerated no gambling, were quiet and law-abiding, said grace devoutly at meals, and concluded each day’s labor with communal prayers and songs.”
Then of course there was the importance the Saints played in building the Transcontinental Telegraph. As with the Transcontinental Railroad, the building of the telegraph found vigorous support from Brigham Young who led the Saints in obtaining the necessary resources and in providing essential labor to build the telegraph through what were then large portions of arid, desolate deserts. Out of respect for the importance the Saints had in building the telegraph, Brigham was allowed to send out the first message on it, in which he expressed a desire for all mankind to be connected together by the telegraph so that the entire world could converse together. By the time of his death, the Saints had built over 1,000 miles of telegraph lines in the West and the church even owned its own telegraph company, the Deseret Telegraph Company which was operated directly by the President of the Church.
Brigham Young’s influence and leadership, as a result of all these factors, had a huge impact on the face of the American West, easily as much, if not more than, just about any other American leader during this period. Yet, here as of late, there is only one thing people seem to be able to discuss in regard to Brigham Young.
Photo from KSLTV.
Yes, Brigham Young, like many of his day, was a racist. And racism is being rightfully, and needfully, discussed today in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. For many of the Latter-day Saints, the question of Brigham Young’s racism is an important one to be addressed. But often those trying to do so are as ignorant of Brigham Young’s racial beliefs, good and bad, as well as the context in which those ideas arose, as they are of his massive contributions to the good of American society. The purpose then of this article is to explore the actual beliefs Brigham Young had regarding race, the context in which those ideas developed, correct some often promulgated errors about his beliefs and actions (specifically regarding slavery), and finally address the issue of how Latter-day Saints should respond to the issue today.
Racist Beliefs
The first thing we must acknowledge is a simple fact: Brigham Young was a racist. There are enough recorded statements from him from diverse enough sources that establish that he was without a doubt a racist. Yet, the quality and intensity of his racism is harder to define than you might think. The reason for that is because the The Journal of Discourses, the largest preserved compendium of Brigham’s statements, including many of his most racist ones, is heavily flawed with large sections of speeches attributed to Brigham Young (and many other early church leaders) that were either heavily altered or entirely made up.
The Journal of Discourses (hereafter JoD) are a series of addresses given by early church leaders, mostly Prophets and Apostles, in the early Utah era, compiled into a series of books. The recorder and editor of the JoD between 1854 and 1868 was George D. Watt, the first official British convert to the church and secretary to Brigham Young. Watt was responsible for recording many of the addresses made by Brigham Young and did so in a type of shorthand called Pitman shorthand, which was a form of stenographic code that allowed for the quick recording of speeches in real time by hand. For years the JoD have been seen as providing “irreplaceable insight” into the early Utah period and the statements within the JoD have been accepted as being factual representations of what the speakers said. Today we know this is wrong in some very serious ways that call into question everything Watt touched, including Brigham Young’s sermons.
Dr. Gerrit Dirkmaat, associate professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University and LaJean Purcell Carruth, who has taught herself Watt’s personal version of Pitman shorthand so that she would be able to read Watt’s original notes, have discovered something incredibly important about Watt’s final published speeches as found in the JoD: Watt made much of it up completely, by himself. Note, that I do not mean he made common scribal errors which could cause the addition or subtraction of an important word, here or there. I mean that Watt apparently recorded the original speeches as faithfully as he could and then, when getting them ready for publishing, drastically and intentionally altered them. As Dr. Dirkmaat explains:
In the Watt shorthand transcriptions, as opposed to what was then published in the Journal of Discourses , there are sometimes hundreds of differences, sometimes thousands of differences. If you’re just talking words, there are some sermons there that have 1,000 words left out. There are some sermons where there’s 400 words included. I don’t mean just articles like “the” and “and.” I mean entire portions of the sermon that were spoken to the congregation that clearly he recorded, but when that same sermon was published were not included.
Not only did Watt remove massive amounts of text, he also adds his own words to them. As Mrs. Carruth explains:
He [Watt] might have thought he was improving Brigham Young. He changed Brigham Young’s blunt speech and his short sentences into what he probably perceived was a very eloquent speech. …George Watt took out words that Brigham Young said. He added words that Brigham Young never said, including whole paragraphs. Large sections in the Journal of Discourses have no relationship to the shorthand document. Then he’d change words. He’d change Brigham Young’s short sentences to long sentences.
She further explains that Watt also consistently altered specific words and thereby changing the whole meaning of certain statements. For example, anytime Brigham Young used the word “heart” Watt would change it to “mind.” Watt would often change questions into statements, thereby making inquiries like, “Do some of you feel this way?” into accusations, “Some of you feel this way.” Watt would take conditional statements, such as Brigham saying, “If I am perfect in my sphere…” and change them into definitive statements, “I am perfect in my sphere,” which of course alters what we understand of his character dramatically, turning the humble, pleading man what Mrs. Carruth discovered in her work into the more hardnosed, unyielding man of Latter-day Saint myth.
[Note: Since the time I first published this article the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has released a series of three articles going into some detail on Watts’s unauthorized alteration of the speeches he recorded, published, and what ultimately become the Journal of Discourses. You can read these fantastic articles here.]
Confusion and Contradiction
So, why is this important? Well, because if we’re going to confront the “legacy of racism” left by Brigham Young we have to first determine exactly what that legacy is and to do that we have to know what he said and what he taught. This is much harder to do when the largest, most important source for what Brigham said and taught -for determining his legacy- is a hugely flawed work that was heavily altered by an editor who was largely unsupervised (as discussed in the linked article, very rarely, if ever, did Brigham or other church leaders review what Watt published before or after he did so) and who inserted his own beliefs into the mouths of the Prophets and Apostles.
Not only does this call into question the majority of the JoD itself, it actually helps explain some of the more confusing and contradictory statements held therein. Take for example this infamous Brigham Young quote:
Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so. The nations of the earth have transgressed every law that God has given, they have changed the ordinances and broken every covenant made with the fathers, and they are like a hungry man that dreameth that he eateth, and he awaketh and behold he is empty.
Upon first reading it sounds like Brigham Young is saying that when black people and white people get married that they should both be killed and that this is the law of God. To call this racist is an understatement. It seems very clear from this quote that Brigham Young has no problem encouraging and defending violence against black men and women. Yet, in the very next paragraph he says this:
Who can stay the hand of Jehovah, or turn aside the providences of the Almighty? I say to all men and all women, submit to God, to his ordinances and to His rule; serve Him, and cease your quarrelling, and stay the shedding of each other’s blood.
If the Government of the United States, in Congress assembled, had the right to pass an anti-polygamy bill, they had also the right to pass a law that slaves should not be abused as they have been; they had also a right to make a law that negroes should be used like human beings, and not worse than dumb brutes. For their abuse of that race, the whites will be cursed, unless they repent.
Do you see the contradictions? He goes from white people and black people who marry one another should be killed to all killing should completely cease to whites will be punished for their treatment of black people in three paragraphs, one right after the other. You cannot say God commands that a certain group of people should be killed and then say God commands that all killing should stop without massively contradicting yourself. He further adds that white people will be punished for treating black people like animals. So how do we explain this contradiction?
Or, at least, that is a perfectly possible explanation for such serious contradiction. Perhaps Watt edited something out. Perhaps Watt added his own ideas in. Perhaps he tweaked it to say what he wanted or what he thought Brigham meant by changing a few words. The point is that I don’t know. No one knows. Not right now anyway. Most of the information we have is flawed, coming as it does from someone we know is a liar who essentially forged the words of Brigham Young and presented them to the church and the world as authentic. Even if we assume that the final version we have as quoted above is essentially word for word it still doesn’t explain the contradictions inherent in Brigham’s stated positions.
Yes, we know Brigham Young was a racist. But to what extent he was a racist and what exactly where his views are issues that are up for more debate than most people realize. A lot of the evidence comes from either an untrustworthy source, a source that contradicts itself, or both. Now I’m sure some people will respond that it doesn’t matter. They’ll dismiss it as a totally black-and-white issue. All racists are evil and deserve nothing but total condemnation and expunging from the public eye. Or at least they’ll say as much. In reality, no one actually believes that. Everyone recognizes there is a difference between whether Brigham Young was more like Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis. And that difference in turn informs how the Latter-day Saints, and everyone else, should think about him. In order to do that we have to look at other, better, more trustworthy sources than the JoD.
The Great Emancipator
In 1852, Brigham Young gave perhaps the most racist speech of his life. On February 5, he stood up as Territorial Governor of Utah and said:
Again to the subject before us; as to The men bearing rule; not one of the children of old Cain, have one partical of right to bear Rule in Government affairs from first to last, they have no buisness there. this privilege was taken from them by there own transgressions, and I cannot help it; and should you or I bear rule we ought to do it with dignity and honour before God.
I am as much oposed to the principle of slavery as any man in the present acceptation or usage of the term, it is abused. I am opposed to abuseing that which God has decreed, to take, a blessing, and make a curse of it. It is a great blessing to the seed of Adam to have the seed of Cain for servants, but those they serve should use them with all the heart and feeling, as they would use their own children, and their compassion should reach over them, and round about them, and treat them as kindly, and with that humane feeling necessary to be shown to mortall beings of the human species. Under these sercumstances there blessings in life are greater in proportion than those who have to provide the bread and dinner for them
That sounds fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? He continues the same paternalistic message that all justifiers of slavery had used, that it was for the slave’s own good. But, there is a serious problem with that. That problem being the message (pg. 15) he had sent to the Utah Legislatures in his role as Governor of the Territory just one month prior:
“Restrictions of law and government make all servants; but human flesh to be dealt in as property, is not consistent or compatible with the true principles of government. My own feelings are, that no property can or should be recognized as existing in slaves, either Indian or African. No person can purchase them without their becoming as free, so far as natural rights are concerned, as persons of any other color….Thus will a people be redeemed from servile bondage both mental and physical, and placed upon a platform upon which they can build; and extend forth as far as their capability and natural rights will permit; their thralldom will no longer exist, although the seed of Canaan will inevitably carry the curse which was placed upon them, until the same authority which placed it there, shall see proper to have it removed.”
Are you experiencing intellectual whiplash yet? I should think so. In less than a month the man who denounced slavery and said that the Curse of Cain/Ham (the belief that Africans were descended from a cursed ancestor, either the biblical Cain or Ham) didn’t justify slavery to saying that the same concept justified preventing people of African descent from holding any political office and justified paternalistic slavery. The self-same man would later declare:
I am neither an abolitionist nor a pro-slavery man.
Circa 1855
Which one is the real Brigham? Is it the man who is neither pro-slavery nor an abolitionist (a statement that makes him sound like a free-soiler), the one who defends paternalistic slavery, or the one who says that no property can be recognized in human flesh? Not only is it hard to figure out, there is another complicating element. Only the second quote is written directly by Brigham Young himself. The first and third one come from our friend George D. Watt. I try not to sound conspiratorial, but isn’t it coincidental that some of Brigham’s most racist, most pro-slavery statements come from George Watt while Brigham’s own statements speak out against chattel slavery? There is certainly a high chance of coincidence here, after all Watt was Brigham’s secretary for many years and correlation doesn’t mean causation. But it is still a very interesting correlation, to say the least.
To complicate things even farther, the speech that Watt records Brigham giving in the first quote where he supports slavery is actually Brigham commenting on a law that he had signed the day before in regards to slavery in Utah. Mrs. Carruth explains:
Brigham Young gave a speech in the legislature on February 5, 1852, on slavery and on the priesthood ban. There was one other statement regarding the priesthood ban a few days earlier in the legislature. Somehow in history, this speech was misdated as January 5, 1852. …Also, when this speech was dated as January 5, people understood that Brigham Young was telling the legislature what to do. Actually, the legislation was passed and signed by Brigham Young on the 4th of [Feburary]. Then he came into the legislature on the 5th, the day after. The legislature asked him to give his views on slavery, and he did.
That is the speech at the start of this section where he supports slavery as a possible good for African peoples. In addition to the major contradiction as discussed above there is the much deeper contradiction of him defending slavery after just having signed a law that actually turned Utah into a de facto free territory. Most people don’t realize this because they’ve never read the law -only Brigham’s remarks as reported by Watt- and assume that the law was also pro-slavery. It was not, it is the exact opposite. It was an emancipation law.
The article “The True Policy for Utah: Servitude, Slavery, and ‘An Act in Relation to Service’” by Christopher B. Rich Jr. in the Utah Historical Quarterly is the best treatment of slavery during Brigham Young’s era. Dr. Rich notes that the law, called An Act in Relation to Service, made the enslavement of the children of slaves illegal. In Utah, children born to black slaves were born free. This would have meant the peaceful elimination of slavery in Utah in a generation. The Utah law also demanded slaves be educated. In these measures Utah was essentially following the pattern that Northern states such as New Jersey, Illinois, and Indiana had followed in eliminating slavery within their boundaries. Some of these changes were so severe that Rich argues that they effectively made chattel slavery illegal in Utah in all but name:
[I]f one carefully examines the text of the statute in its proper context, it becomes clear that this legislation did not legalize chattel slavery as it has been alleged. Rather, the act was an attempt to find a practical compromise between three contradictory goals. The first of these goals was to abolish the status of “slave,” meaning a human being who is legally reduced to a chattel, or a piece of personal property. However, the second goal was to honor the property rights of a small number of Southern slaveholders who brought their slaves into Utah while also ensuring that these bondsmen would be subject to the influence and authority of the community at large. Finally, the third goal was to uphold the appearance of neutrality towards slavery in order to strengthen a bid for statehood. In order to accommodate these goals, the law instituted a scheme of quasi-indentured servitude and gradual emancipation for African slaves who immigrated to the territory with their masters.
One of the most important changes this law introduced was the elimination of the status of slave. By transforming all slaves into indentured servants this law not only prevented the children of slaves from being forced into perpetual chattel slavery themselves, but it also gave the former slaves now indentured servants formal legal rights to property, recompense, and education. The law also gave former slaves now indentured servants the right to appear and testify in court, without the presence of a master or mistress, which was important because the law also now protected the former slaves and now indentured servants from “cruel and inhuman treatment” as well as sexual exploitation (a master or mistress who had sex with his or her servant faced a multitude of legal punishments, including the loss of the servant). The law also required the slave to appear before a legal court and give assent to being forced to move to Utah and, once there, his or her assent to the sale of his or her indenture by his or her current master or mistress to another.
By enacting this law, Utah was following the examples of Northern free states, whose laws this law was patterned after, in eliminating chattel slavery and extending important civil rights to both people brought into the territory as slaves as well as their children who would be born as free men and women. If these kinds of laws made Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and New York “free states” then what can we conclude about Utah other than the enacting of these laws made it a free territory? And no matter what he said, what can we say about Brigham Young but that he supported and signed a law whose purpose was to limit and ultimately eliminate slavery in Utah?
If Abraham Lincoln could repeatedly and openly support the legal right of slavery in the Southern states, champion an amendment to the Constitution to protect Southern slavery in perpetuity, promote another set of amendments during the Civil War that would’ve protected slavery all the way into the 20th century (1900 AD), support using federal monies to colonize free blacks in an entirely other country, and say repeatedly that he believed that Africans were the inferior of the white man and should be kept in a lower status by law and prevented from intermarrying with whites and still be called the Great Emancipator for his actions eliminating slavery through bloody conquest and war, how much more should we not give Brigham Young, whose views on race are comparable to Lincoln’s own, the same accolade for helping to accomplish the end of slavery in Utah, and for doing so peacefully without war? At least Brigham thought it was possible for free blacks and whites to live together peacefully, if not equally. Lincoln did not.
Don’t mistake my intent. Indentured servitude is still a form of coerced labor and is therefore wrong. The only completely moral position was William Lloyd Garrison’s- immediate emancipation without any restrictions. But I’m not going to condemn someone who has come so far only because they were not able to go farther. And make no mistake, no matter what Brigham Young felt, there wasn’t any farther he or anyone else could have gone. While we may wish he and the Utah Legislature immediately ended slavery for all slaves in the territory, it is important to remember that he could not do such a thing. Though they were able to, and did, end the Mexican slave trade (pgs. 510-511) once settled in Utah, the Constitution protected the “right” of the American slaveholder to take his or her slaves anywhere within the US, a power that would only be reconfirmed by the Dred Scott decision a few years after Utah passed its emancipation law. The only power that states and territories had was to limit by law the creation of new slaves within their boundaries; states and territories could not automatically free people who were already slaves but they could prevent the children of slaves from becoming slaves. Which is exactly what they did. Expecting Brigham to immediately free all the slaves when he legally could not so is to ignore the real world context in which he was operating. He was bound by that “Covenant with Death and Agreement with Hell” that is the Constitution of the United States of America.
Then of course there was the issue of Native American slavery. The Saints often bought children from the local Natives who had captured them while fighting with other tribes. If the children weren’t bought many of them would be killed. Latter-day Saint pioneer Daniel W. Jones provides us one example of this in his autobiography:
Stopping this [the Mexican] slave business helped to sour some of Worker’s band. They were in the habit of raiding on the Pahutes and low tribes, taking their children prisoners and selling them. Next year when they came up and camped on the Provo bench, they had some Indian children for sale. They offered them to the Mormons who declined buying. Arapine, Walker’s brother, became enraged saying that the Mormons had stopped the Mexicans from buying these children; that they had no right to do so, unless they bought them themselves. Several of us were present when he took one of these children by the heels and dashed its brains out on the hard ground, after which he threw the body towards us, telling us we had no hearts, or we would have bought it and saved its life.
I agree that slavery is one of the worst evils in human history. But if faced with the option between seeing a child murdered, being tortured in horrendous ways, and/or being starved to death and knowing I could do something to change that by purchasing the child’s freedom, I would do it. In this I believe that Garrison’s defense of helping to legally purchase the freedom of Fredrick Douglass applies- the sin is not with the person doing the buying, but in the “man-stealer” who receives the money as he values lucre more than liberty. Native American children bought this way were also protected by the law as African peoples were. The best, most digestible work on this topic, covering the good and the unfortunate, is “To Buy Up the Lamanite Children as Fast as They Could”: Indentured Servitude and Its Legacy in Mormon Society by Dr. Brian Q. Cannon.
Conclusions
So, where does all this leave us? What is the explanation for these apparent contradictions? I, for one, think the issue comes down to politics. In the book Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (pgs. 507-508) Dr. John David Smith suggests that Brigham may have taken a pro-slavery stance in his speech (assuming we have his words and not Watt’s) because he was hoping to get the support of Southern politicians for Utah’s application for statehood. I see this as a distinct possibility. Why else would a man who was in fact supporting a law that would turn Utah into a de facto free territory speak in a way that would seemingly endorse slavery at the exact same time? And why would he give said pro-slavery speech only a month after he had publicly and completely denounced slavery altogether? The whole thing sounds like political theater. He understood that Utah would never be admitted as an official free territory. He knew Utah would never get the support from Southern politicians necessary to become a state if Utah openly denounced slavery. So he did something incredibly cagey. He supported a gradual emancipation law but couched it in expressly racist and pro-slavery terms. Thereby he could limit slavery and also, hopefully, still get the support he needed to try and get Utah admitted as a state, which he wanted because it would protect the church from federal attack over polygamy and other arbitrary exercises of federal authority.
Given the corrupted nature of the JoD and by association just about everything that came through George Watt, perhaps the best indication of Brigham Young’s racism can be found in the the Act in Relation to Service itself, which we know he read and “declared himself perfectly satisfied with.” In it, chattel slavery was forbidden and people of African descent were extended numerous rights they did not hold under the slave system, including the right to a wage, the right to testify in court, the right to an education, protections against “cruel and inhumane treatment,” protections against rape, protections against other forms of sexual abuse, protections against their families being split up, protections against being forced to leave the state, and the right of their children to liberty. In turn the Act forbade blacks and whites from intermarrying, forbade to them the right to hold public office, and forbade them the right to vote.
In holding these views while taking the political actions that he did, Brigham Young was essentially no different than other Free-Soiler Northerners of his era, including Abraham Lincoln. And just as many are proud of Lincoln despite the limitations of his racial vision there is no reason that the Saints should not be justifiably proud of Brigham Young despite the limitations of his racial vision. In doing so we can both acknowledge the fallibility of men and celebrate their achievements while marveling at the Lord’s power to bring His great works to pass through the weak things, and people, of the Earth. We will only be joining hands with those black men and women who knew the man personally and who, as Dr. Amy Tanner Thiriot explained “almost uniformly …loved and respected Brigham Young.”