Gathering the Scattered Children of Lehi: Constructions of Whiteness and Israelite Lineage in the Pacific Islands Missions

What follows is a paper I presented at the Mormon History Associations annual conference in 2009, with a few revisions made since then. I was in the History MA program at BYU at the time. I am a little shaky on some of the conclusions I drew and suggestions I made then; it would probably sound a bit different if I wrote it now. And some of it may be rendered a bit obsolete by Hokulani K. Aikau’s recent work. But I still wanted to post it here because it is something I would like to develop further in future work (so feedback is more than welcome), and also because, like many of us, I hate to see work I put effort into drop off into nothingness. So here it is:

While teaching a high-school-aged youth Sunday school class in Provo recently, we came across one of the several Book of Mormon passages that referred to the prophesied change that would occur among the Lamanite descendants when they eventually embraced the Gospel; that is, as 3 Ne 2: 15 puts it, that “their curse [would] be taken from them, and their skin [become] white like unto the Nephites.” After reading this verse, or one like it, a student asked me if this meant that Lamanites would turn white after they were baptized. “What do you think?” I asked him. He said that he thought it did. I assumed he was joking, but I wasn’t quite sure (he has the same smirk on his face when joking and when bearing his testimony, so it’s hard to tell). Another student then chimed in with a joke that brought the implications of these passages (as often interpreted) starkly to the fore: “So if Barak Obama got baptized Mormon,” he quipped, “then he would no longer be the first African American president?”

I was amazed how quick the link was made from Lamanites to this vestigial remnant of the old mark of Ham/Cain myth. Both had become conflated in the minds of these students so that the curse was associated purely with color. Any color, that is, other than white. White was simply the primal original’the state from which some had strayed and toward which all must eventually return through a process of repentance and submission to the ordinance of the Gospel. Regardless of whether they were serious or joking–and I’m quite sure they were joking–their statements have serious implications.  And these statements were made in a mixed race classroom, with students from interracial families–black, white, Hispanic, Latino/Latina–including the two who made these comments. When two students in particular did not show up the next week, these implications became all the more troubling.

As this opening narration suggests, in this paper I am primarily concerned with problems of race and whiteness in the Book of Mormon, at least as it often is and has been interpreted. It has become a truism that history is written for the present, not the past. Accordingly, my research in this topic is done with an eye to how we can better temper some troubling current attitudes and challenges I and others have encountered in our experience as Latter-day Saints. My selection of Hawai’i is perhaps somewhat random; I simply was engaged in a project involving these sources. I could just as easily address this topic with sources from South America, North America, the Philippines, or somewhere else. But the Hawaiian sources serve well to make my point, which is this: conceptions of race and Israelite lineage have changed over time and they will continue to change. And more importantly, there are probably changes we can make in our attitudes, our interpretations, our pedagogy, and even to our sacred texts.

So, the Hawaiian, erstwhile Sandwich Islands,Mission:

George Q. Cannon, who was among the first missionaries to land in the Sandwich Islands in 1851, when the mission was opened, later recalled his first encounter with Native Hawaiians upon landing at the dock:

“No sooner was the anchor dropped than the decks were crowded with natives; some trying to sell bananas, oranges, cocoanuts, melons and other fruits,” and others anxious to take us ashore. The monotonous character of their language, their rapid utterance, their numerous gestures, caused us to watch them with interest. We thought them a strange people. I little thought at that time that I would ever learn their language, or become as familiar with their customs as I afterwards did; for, though we had been sent on missions to the Islands, we supposed our time would be occupied in preaching to the whites.[1]

It sounds preposterous now, in retrospect. Why go all the way to Hawaii 1851 in order to proselyte only the white immigrants? It is mind boggling. But, obviously, with their mindset as young missionaries sent from Utah who did not speak the Native language it must have seemed only logical to seek out the white (presumably English-speaking) inhabitants of the Islands. But in addition to linguistic challenges, their racial worldview must have played a role as well; for missionaries going to Italy or Scandinavia probably were not intending to only seek out English speakers in those missions.

The “whites” on the Islands were composed mainly of whalers and sailors who were, the missionaries concluded, more interested in brothels than catechism, and Protestant and Catholic missionaries who would have seen these young upstart Mormons as competition. Accordingly, the whites of the Islands proved, for the most part, rather uninterested and the missionaries’ efforts were unsuccessful. ‘the question arose directly,” Elder Cannon wrote, “Shall we confine our labors to the white people?” There was apparently uncertainty among them because they had not been specifically instructed to teach the Native Hawaiians. A disputation arose. “For my part,” recalled Cannon, “I felt it to be clearly my duty to warn all men, white and red.” Cannon’s resolve came only after some hesitation, however, and much reasoning upon the subject. His decision to stay and teach the Natives was something he arrived at only after a thorough consideration of their situation and a weighing of their options.  “We were in their midst, had full authority to declare unto them the message of salvation, and if we did not declare it unto them, some other Elders would have to come and do so, in order to fulfill the command of God to his servants,” he reasoned. In other words, it was his duty; “for I felt that I could not do otherwise and be free from condemnation.”

Two of the other elders concurred, but others disagreed. ‘some of the Elders [were] of the opinion,” Cannon recalled, “that our mission was to the whites, and that when we had warned them, we were at liberty to return.”

Both Cannon, who felt duty-bound to stay and teach the natives, and the missionaries who felt no obligation to stay, seemed preoccupied with their own obligation. That is, they were there not only to spread the good news but to clear themselves of a responsibility, and they seemed to keenly feel that a failure to do so on their part would bring them under condemnation. They were called upon to raise the warning voice. Once they did so, if no one listened, then that was all they could do. They had no more obligation. They could dust their feet of the place and be done with it. This view was probably shaped not only by verses in the New Testament to this effect but also passages from the Book of Mormon, such as Jacob 1:19, which speaks of ridding ones garments of the blood or guilt of others by “teach[ing] them the word of god with all diligence; otherwise their blood would come upon our garments and we would not be found spotless at the last day.” This commission, like that Christ gave to his disciples in the New Testament, applied presumably to all nations, tongues, and peoples. And yet, it was not readily apparent to these young missionaries that it applied to native Hawaiians–not until they had been rejected by the whites on the Islands and not even then for some of the elders. Did they, at least at a subconscious level, consider the Hawaiians subhuman?

At least one of the missionaries could not stomach the idea of living among and teaching the native Hawaiians and decided to return home. “He would go home, he said, and gladly take a mission to Europe,” as Cannon recalled, “but to labor there [in Hawai’i] he could not do with any pleasure. Besides, he was an old bachelor–and he ought to be married.” Unfortunately, Cannon instructs us, he was never married and was killed by Indians some time after returning home (read [sardonically, and according to usage and attitudes of the time]: the “Lamanites” got him after all!).

Among those who remained there eventually developed the idea that the native Hawaiians were among the House of Israel’the children of Abraham. This connection/revelation is generally attributed to George Q. Cannon. In 1852, according to reports, he addressed Native Hawaiian Saints present at a mission conference and declared to them that if they would follow the guidance of the spirit ‘they would progress-and even outstrip their white brethren, for they were of the House of Israel.”[2] A half-century later he reiterated this idea to a group of Hawaiian Saints, reportedly saying that “he knew it because the Lord told him so at Lahaina [during his mission there].”[3]

It is not clear, however, as some have suggested, that Cannon made the connection between House of Israel and Nephite or Lamanite lineage. That is, while Cannon apparently thought of Hawaiians as Children of Israel, he may not have at this (or even at any) point thought of them as Children of Lehi. Even twenty years later, when he published a reminiscence of his first mission for juvenile Latter-day Saint readers, he does not explicitly identify Hawaiians as Lamanites, though he does associate the two. “Many Elders desire, when they are called as missionaries,” Cannon writes, ‘to go to enlightened and cultivated nations. They think their experience among such people would be profitable to them, and that they would become polished and learn many things which they would not obtain among a people, for instance, like Sandwich Islanders or the Lamanites.”[4]  At first glance this may be taken as an identification of Hawaiians as Lamanites, but it is not clear how the or in the sentence is functioning. Is it restrictive, so that Lamanites is functioning as an appositive to Sandwich Islanders, equating the two? Or is it non-restrictive, simply making an association between two mutually exclusive yet related groups, in this case, Hawaiians (“red men” of theIslands) and Lamanites (“red men” on the mainland)? If the latter is the case, they could be related without being conflated–children of Abraham, yes, but not necessarily children of Lehi.

However precisely Cannon identified Hawaiians, he clearly came to believe that the promises made in the Book of Mormon applied to them as well as (if not as a part of) the Lamanites. Regarding his translation of the Book of Mormon into the Hawaiian language, Cannon stated: ‘thus was the Book of Mormon first translated and published in the language of a race of red men “a part of the race for whom its promises are most abundant.” [5] Again, this may be an equation of Hawaiians as Lamanites, or it may simply be an association, lumping them in among the children of Abraham, which included not only red Lamanites, but “white” Jews and, eventually, white Ephraimites.[6] But the association to Lamanites is much closer in Cannon’s mind “for they are both ‘red men.”

The second wave of Mormon missionaries arrived in the Islandsfive years later in 1856[7]; among them was young fifteen-year-old Joseph F. Smith. A perusal of Smith’s journals and his letters exchanged with other missionaries from this periods show that the missionaries typically referred to Hawaiians as “natives” rather than as Lamanites or Israelites. They tended to refer to them as “poor,” “ignorant,” “benighted,” “degraded” beings. While such descriptions are similar to how Protestant missionaries tended to view Hawaiians, the missionary’s racial worldview was shaped at least in part by their understanding of the Book of Mormon.  On a Sunday morning service in Wailuku, Hawaii, in March of 1856, young Joseph F. rose and delivered a sermon to the gathered Hawaiian Latter-day Saints. As he noted in his journal entry for that day, he “prophysied that they would live (some of them) to see their children a white and delitesome people, if they would only obey the laws of God, and gather up to zion, on the other hand, they should be rejected; cast off, and despised by all the good and bad of the Earth who knew them[.]” (As a side note, he also noted that when services reconvened in the afternoon “there were not many at meeting.”)[8] Smith had clearly imbibed the language of 2 Ne 30:6, referring to a future day in which the Lehite descendants would embrace the Gospel their ancestors rejected “and not many generations shall pass away among them, save they shall become a white and a delightsome people.”

Around this same time, speculation on the Hawaiian people’s origin became a topic of discussion in missionary letters. “From whence this people originated is a question not yet solved by the ‘learned'” wrote missionary John R. Young to his father in 1856.

Many have tried to trace them back to the Malay tribe. It is evident that the inhabitants of the Polynesian Islands have all sprang from the same race; the resemblance of features and the sameness of dialects go to prove this, and I think if a person was well versed in the productions of Moses, the historian, or acquainted with the history of the Aborigines of America, as translated by Joseph Smith, that he would be able to solve the question from whence originated the Hawaiians.

Once again, Young does not quite make the equation of Hawaiians with Lamanites–as Lamanites–but he hints at it, or something analogous  to it, suggesting that the Book of Mormon, as a new old world record, may contain hints to their origin.

Young’s comments on comparative linguistics, attention to physical features, and, later in his letter, on comparative mythology and religion, reveals a young man very much in tune with the racialist thinking of his day. He was living as a white man among “natives,” after all, only three years after Gobineau had published the first volume of his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, which put forward the hugely influential Aryan master race theory, and three years before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. I am not suggesting the Young had read Gobineau or that he would have had any idea whoDarwin was at this point, but these ideas were very much a preoccupation of Western society at this time, young Mormon missionaries not excepted.

Many of these popular ideas and methodologies for determining racial distinctions and possible origins (etiological and teleological legends, really)’two concepts that were quite interrelated were being inculcated into youth through periodical literature. Mormon literature was no exception. A series of such articles by LDS author George Reynolds, coming a decade after these missionaries returned from Hawaii but still quite telling as a picture of their racial worldview, was published in the Juvenile Instructor under the heading “Man and His Varieties” between August and December 1868.

After explaining and refuting the several current views on the origins and development of the races of humanity: polygenesis, evolution (which he termed the “development theory”), influence of climate. Reynolds gave what LDS should see, he felt, as “the greatest cause of all in bringing about this [racial] difference”: “the effect the blessing or cursing of the lord has upon any people.” According to this view, Mormon youth could account for the differences they saw between human beings not by assuming that different groups came from different ancestors, or that some have evolved farther from monkeys than others had (which is basically how evolution was caricatured in the article), or that climate had caused the changes; rather, those of the so-called “inferior” and “degraded” races had descended to that position by rejecting God. “All who believe the sacred records given to us in these days, know how easy it is for men when they depart from the service of God to descend from the highest and purest forms of life to the lowest and most degraded.”[9]

Reynolds did not entirely dismiss all others ideas in regard to racial formation, however. He did believe that climate, food, and religion each had an effect on racial characteristics and features. But these factors were not the original cause of the races, they simply heighten or augment distinctions that God put in place (or refrained from putting into place in the case of whiteness’the absence of color/curse) to indicate his pleasure or displeasure with said peoples.

After outlining the standard 5-race classification according the feature delineations of the day “the shape of the skull, the color of the skin, the texture of the hair, the general makeup of the body and the nature of the language spoken.” Reynolds unequivocally placed the Caucasian race at the top of the scale. The Caucasian is described as “those who have ruled and now rule the world.” They are “foremost in arts, sciences and civilization” and “all the other families of men are, as a rule, unequal to them in strength, size, beauty, learning, and intelligence.” Belonging to this race are Europeans (“except Laplanders and Finlanders”) and those of European descent in America and Australia; “Also the Jews, Arabs, Hindoos, Affgans, Syrians and Turks as well as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Parthians and Egyptians of older times.” At the bottom of the scale is “the Negro” and in between are the other three races in no exact order. The Malayan race is described as a brown or copper colored race whose members are located in parts of southern Asia and ‘the greater portion of the Islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.”

In delineating the “Malayan race,” however, the “learned,” or “uninspired men,” had erred in grouping all Pacific Islanders under this classification. “the revelations of the Lord to the Prophet Joseph Smith have dispelled the darkness with regard to the origin of many of the varieties of man now on the earth,” writes Reynolds. Accordingly, “it is well understood by us that [Sandwich Islanders] are of the same stock as the Lamanites.” As evidence of this Reynolds points out “how soon they adopted the religion of Europeans and imitated their habits and mode of dress. ‘their laws were changed to a European pattern, schools and colleges were established.”[10] Further evidence that they belong to the House of Israel is “the great success the Elders have had in preaching the gospel in their midst.” Thus it was a response to whiteness: European religious, legal, and educational patterns, coupled with Mormonism (which some would call the whitest of American religions) that proved their lineal origin in Lehite stock.

This was not the first time the Hawaiian people were clearly alluded to as descendents of Lehi. When Brigham Young wrote to King Kamehameha V in 1858, explaining the missionaries’ purpose there and requesting his sanction, he explained that “we have not a doubt in our minds but that’the people of your majesty’s nation” are a Branch of this same great family [the Lehites]. You are of the House of Israel,’the Book of Mormon “is your Book; for the promises” which it contains, are as applicable to your majesty’s nation as to the nations of this Continent. This, being our belief, accounts for the interest we feel as a people in your majesty’s nation.” The “man and his Varieties’ articles, however, may have been the first to make that connection via the story of Hagoth, who was not identified by name but as ‘some adventurous Nephite sailor” and is alluded to with a reference to the Book of Mormon.

By the mid twentieth century the Hagoth connection had become quite entrenched. In 1942, a booklet titled Hawaiian Mission in Review paralleled the Hagoth story with local legends, particularly the etiological legend of Hawaii-loa, the distant ancestor of the Hawaiian people who, according to the legend, sailed here long ago from a far off land. Several other biblical and Book of Mormon events and characters were identified in local myths, including Nephi and the “early division between the white Nephites and the dark-skinned Lamanites,” though of course in different terms.

Since Hagoth would have been a white Nephite, according to a typical racialized reading of the Book of Mormon, the authors of the review realized they needed to somehow account for the brown skin of the Hawaiian people. Rather than suggesting that the curse gradually descended upon them through apostasy and degradation, the narrative suggests that it was through intermarriage with other Islanders to the south “who, in turn had intermarried with the dark-skinned residents of the islands near the Orient. In this manner–and by constant exposure to the sun’the Hawaiians gradually became a bronzed race. (“The skin of a pure Hawaiian is a rich golden-brown,” the narrative parenthetically states, ‘scarcely darker than that of the suntanned Caucasians that now dwell amongst them.)” No mention is made of their becoming white after conversion.

This does not mean that this belief had died out by this time. When Mette Ramstad did field research in the Pacific Islands during the late 1980s and 1990s, as part of his PhD diss., he found that among the older generation many Hawaiians had accepted the belief that their darker skin was a reflection of the Lamanite curse which had gradually come upon their ancestors after they arrived in the Islands and dwindled in unbelief, and that the mark would eventually fade among their descendants. Eugene England found that this belief in Tonga led some Natives to feel unqualified for leadership positions. Ramstad also found, however, that among the younger generation of Hawaiians, though Lamanite or Nephite identity was still strong, they had not absorbed the idea that their dark skin was the result of divine curse, nor, accordingly, that they or their children would even become white as a result of conversion.

Ramstad accounts for this change in perceptions between generations to the fact that “the notion of a racial curse is not emphasized anymore in the teachings and preachings of LDS missionaries and teachers in Polynesia” and also to the change in the Book of Mormon text in 1981, changing the phrase “white and delightsome” to “pure and delightsome.”[11] As Norman Douglas pointed out, this was actually a change Joseph Smith made in the 1840 edition, which, by historical accident, was not included in subsequent editions of the Book of Mormon until 1981. This restoration may have been influenced, Douglas suggests, by a BYU master’s thesis and subsequent Sunstone article by Stan Larson that brought the white-pure discrepancy into public notice.

 Conclusion

“Man and His Varieties,” the series of Juvenile Instructor articles by George Reynolds cited earlier, presents race as a contingent human condition initiated by divine imposition, then augmented by natural conditions, but finally subject to change based upon personal and national righteousness. Reynolds states rather unequivocally that Adam was white, all the prophets and apostles of any age have been white, Jesus was white, and, by implication, even God is white; for “we understand that when God made man in his own image and pronounced him very good, that he made him white.” In Reynolds’s concluding statement all colored races are conflated and the racialist interpretation of 2 Nephi 30:6.” The “white and delightsome” passage is applied as a blanket statement: “For the day will come,” Reynolds states, “when all men capable of receiving the priesthood, enlightened by the spirit of God and guided by its whisperings, will lose their extravagances of character and appearance, and become “a white and delightsome people” physically as well as morally. When they will be as God first made Adam ‘in His own image’ and ‘very good.”

The worldviews of most Latter-day Saints are of course quite different from this today. A number of factors of course have come into play in bringing about this change: the civil rights movement, the 1978 revelation, a decline in the old biblical linage worldview that viewed all people as descendents of Ham, Shem, and Japheth, separated into discrete races respectively, and so forth.  But the opening little anecdote I opened with, from my Sunday school class, leads me to wonder if these ideas have really been overcome. There are still lingering vestigial remnants of past worldviews that we could do without remnants that are not only superfluous but hurtful.

Attempts have been made at a more globally conscious and racially sensitive reading of the Book of Mormon. These include Hugh Nibley’s suggestion that Nephites and Lamanites need not be interpreted as racial categories and Eugene England’s and Normon Douglas’s suggestion that the skin referred to in such passages might better be interpreted figuratively.[12] Such readings are aided by a textual change in the Book of Mormon, mentioned earlier, which changed the term white in “white and delightsome” in 2 Ne 30:6 to pure. In essence the passage suggests that when the Nephite or Lehite descendants in a future day embrace the Gospel of Jesus Christ as taught in the Book of Mormon, they will become “a pure and delightsome people.” The change in question was most likely made by Joseph Smith in the 1840 edition of the Book of Mormon. By historical accident it was left out of subsequent LDS editions until 1981.[13] Latter-day Saints of the 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries interpreted the verse according to the racialist worldview of their day–for the view that white was the primal original from which the colored races had degraded did not begin with nor was it unique to Mormons. Nor was the view that whiteness could literally be gained through “civilization.” (As historian Graham Stott points out, natural philosopher George-Louis Comte de Buffon suggested, “more than a half century before the [Book of Mormon’s] publication, [that] a white skin is a consequence of civilization, not its cause.”) As worldviews have changed, so have interpretations of race in the scripture. If the textual change made to this verse in 1981 not only reflects a return to an earlier and, in a sense, more correct reading, it may also reflect a more racially sensitive awareness–a more moral reading.[14]

Yet, even with a more racially sensitive outlook aided by a more charitable reading of such passages, as suggested by Nibley and England, it is still hard to read a passage like 2 Ne 5: 21 without cringing: “wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.” Even if, taken as a whole, the book may be read as presenting a more universal, racially inclusive view, as Armand Mauss and others have suggested, when isolated, it is hard not to interpret this passage as racialized anti-miscegenation.

So, if Joseph Smith made such a change, as that noted above, in 1840, followed by a much more recent change in 1981, why not continue the project he began 3 Ne 2:15 still reads: “And their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites.” If we can agree that a figurative non-racialized reading is better here (and I realize that that is a big if and might only be an ought), then why not emend the verse in accordance with Joseph Smith’s change in 1840 and take the next logical step: “And their curse was taken from them, and their countenance [or demeanor] became pure.” And why not carry such emendation to the next analogous step as well, so that 2 Ne 5:21 might read: “wherefore, as they were pure, and exceedingly delightsome, that they might not be enticing to my people the Lord God did cause [or perhaps, allow] a pall [or demeanor, or spirit] of darkness [or perhaps some other, less racially charged word”] to come upon them.” Changes of this nature would not be without precedent: LDS scriptural texts have undergone numerous emendations over the years as has the temple endowment and initiatory ceremonies’many of which, presumably, were due to developing cultural sensitivities in a globally expanding church.

Now, I am not under the illusion that changing a few words here and there will solve deeper, more complex problems. Even when interpreted figuratively, the idea of a curse, often applied to indigenous peoples, has troubling implications and often leads to cultural insensitivity and racism. But, deeper problems notwithstanding, I cannot help but feel that it would still be a positive step.

Bibliography

Britsch, R. Lanier. Moramona: The Mormons in Hawaii.Laie,HI: Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1989.

Campbell, Douglas. “White’ or ‘Pure’: Five Vignettes.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 119-135.

Cannon, George Q. My First Mission.Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1882.

Douglas, Norman. ‘the Sons of Lehi and the Seed of Cain: Racial Myths in Mormon Scripture and their Relevance to the Pacific Islands.” Journal of Religious History 8.1 (June 1974): 90-104.

England, Eugene. “Lamanites’ and the Spirit of the Lord.” Dialogue 18.4 (1985): 25-32.

Larson, Stan. “Early Book of Mormon Texts: Textual Changes in the Book of Mormon in 1837 and 1840.” Sunstone 4 (Fall 1976): 45-55.

Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F. “Assembling Bodies and Souls: Missionary Practices on the Pacific Frontier” in Practicing Protestants.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2006, 51-76.

Mauss, Armand L. All Abraham’s Children: Changing Conceptions of Race and Lineage.Urbana:  University ofIllinois Press, 2003.

Nibley, Hugh W. Since Cumorah.Salt Lake City:Deseret Book, 1967.

Ramstad, Mette. Conversion in the Pacific: Eastern Polynesian Latter-day Saints’ conversion accounts and their development of an LDS identity.HoyskoleForlaget,Norway: Norwegian                Academic Press, 2003.

Reynolds, George. “man and his Varieties [series].” Juvenile Instructor, August-September 1868.

Skousen, Royal. Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon.Provo,UT: FARMS, ongoing.

Stott, Graham St. John. “Amerindian Identity, the Book of Mormon, and the American Dream.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 19 (2004): 21-33.

notes:

[1] Cannon, My First Mission (1882), 17.

[2] Douglas, “sons of Lehi,” 97.

[3] Wooley journal, 1900, qtd. In Britsch, Moramona, 116.

[4] My First Mission, 65.

[5] My First Mission, 73.

[6] While Jews in America only gained the social status associated with whiteness gradually through complex historical processes (see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick, N.J and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998), in the typical Mormon imagination at this time–as represented by articles written by George Reynolds below–the chosen lineage of Israel was presumed to be white. On Ephraimites and whiteness see Mauss, All Abraham’s Children.

[7] As a letter from Hiram Clark to Brigham Young indicates, these missionaries were also quite surprised to find so few whites on the Islands, and even those being of a “fluctuating population, composed of California gold diggers and sailors (Deseret News, July 26, 1856).”

[8] JFS diary, March 30, 1856; MS 1325,box 1, fd 3. JFS’s understanding of what constituted the native’s non-whiteness, or lack of “civilization,” as expressed in his journal, extended beyond skin color but also included cultural attitudes, manner of living, and bodily comportment: cooking and eating while sitting on the ground; living in close quarters with dogs, pigs, and cats; lack of hygiene, particularly in regard to contact between pets and cooking ware and food; dress, or the lack thereof; “whoredoms”; unwillingness to attend meetings; unreliability; etc. For a very telling (but not comprehensive) entry on this theme see JFS diary, July 4, 1856 , MS 1325,box 1, fd 3.

[9] “theories on the Origin of Man,” JI, 3.6 (August 15, 1868): 124-25.

[10] G. R. also points out that “unfortunately the crimes and vices so prevalent in modern Christendom became general amongst the natives: which evils are now destroying them much more rapidly than they increase by births, so that it is feared that in a few generations the race will become extinct.” Thus, ironically, in Reynold’s view, the very whiteness that was civilizing the Sandwich Islanders was concurrently driving them to extinction. For Mormons, however, this paradox might have been explainable: for “modern Christendom,” according to Mormon teachings, was in a state of apostasy, having a form of godliness (whiteness?) but denying the power thereof (purity?).

[11] Mette Ramstad, Conversion in the Pacific, 127.

[12] Armand Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 127-28.

[13] See Douglas.

[14] As Royal Skousen’s Critical Text of the Book of Mormon project suggests, if your purpose is to restore the original text and the original manuscript for this verse is non-extant’then white might be a better reading. Accordingly, when I speak of pure as being a better reading, I am speaking largely in a moral sense.

Our Modest Proposal for BYU Women’s Conference: A Mo-TED Talk on Female Ritual Healing

This post co-authored by JI contributors Tona H and J. Stapley

We’ve been thinking…

Each spring, more than 14,000 women converge on the BYU campus for Women?s Conference. The annual 2-day event is cosponsored by BYU and the Relief Society, and it has a remarkable influence among its physical attendees, amplified by the larger sessions being broadcast on BYU-TV and because Deseret Book issues a ?greatest hits? compilation volume of talks from the conference each year. Given its quasi-official status, alongside Deseret Book’s touring production of regional women?s retreats, ?Time Out for Women,? BYU Women?s Conference provides an important venue for devotional talks by and about women?s experiences in the Church. Many LDS women see both as ?approved? forums and use them as a spiritual retreat.

However, BYU Women?s Conference is more like a business conference/trade show than an academic conference. Which got us wondering…

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The Sacred Parking Garage Effect

I get dibs on this clunky coining, but I wanted to articulate something that I’ve noticed in the way many non-academy-trained Mormons approach history. You probably have recognized the same phenomenon under a different name (and I’d love to know what you call it).

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2012 Western History Association–Mormon-Related Presentations

This year’s Western History Association (WHA) conference in Denver, CO on October 4-7, 2012 will feature several presentations oriented toward religion in the American West and some which focus on Mormon topics.

See the full program here.

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Southwestern States Mission: Evil Spirits Revisited

A few weeks ago, on the topic of evil spirits encountered by missionaries in the Southwestern States Mission, I wrote: ?There are a few acknowledgments of the possibility of possession, but no instances of it.? Now, after a trip to the Church History Library, the possession record is slightly more complicated. [1] 

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Responses: Rich Answers Ricks on Utah Servitude/Slavery

Christopher Rich’s response to Nate Ricks’ review of “The True Policy for Utah: Servitude; Slavery; and ‘An Act in Relation to Service,'” Utah Historical Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 54-74.

I was very happy to learn of this forum for discussing LDS History, and jumped at Nate’s invitation to have lunch and discuss the history of servitude in Utah. I found his master’s thesis to be invaluable when I first began to research this area, and thoroughly enjoyed speaking with him about this nuanced and highly interesting topic.

At this point, I should make a confession. I love history. I love LDS history. For this reason I studied history as an undergraduate and have continued to do so ever since. But for better or for worse, I have been professionally trained as an attorney. And as an attorney, I have been taught a simple rule: when interpreting a law, one must first look to the statute. If a court is interpreting a law, the court will always look first to the plain meaning of the text. Thus, when interpreting a statute, what a legislature subjectively meant to say, or what private individuals later perceive the legislature to have meant, is far less important than the actual words that the legislature put to paper. When I originally became interested in Utah’s history of servitude, I read many interesting treatises by a variety of talented historians. Yet I was shocked to see that not one of these had really wrestled with the text of “An Act in Relation to Service.” Nevertheless, each of these historians had come to a legal conclusion: that the act created a system of chattel slavery in Utah.

With Nate, I agree that this was a highly complex law and the Saints created it for a variety of complex reasons. Some of these had to do with theology, some with the Jacksonian worldview with which most early LDS leaders had been raised, and some with the pressures of contemporary American politics. I must also admit that many of the statute’s most important sections are not as clearly written as one would hope. For this reason, I spent hours parsing each word and clause, then going back and reading the law as a whole. I then expanded to the marginal notes included with the published text, other contemporary statutes and court decisions, the statements of interested parties such as Brigham Young and Orson Hyde, and many excellent secondary sources of both law and history. When it was over, I determined that while the law certainly created a system of involuntary servitude and gradual emancipation for previously bonded African-Americans, it did not create a system of chattel slavery, nor did the Utah Legislature intend it to do so.

People are certainly free to disagree with my conclusions. Nevertheless, I believe that valid criticism of my position must be grounded in the text of the statute. Now, as I have stated, this text is at times unclear. Furthermore, no contemporary court ever interpreted the law, save for the incomplete probate court decision in the case of Dan which I mention in my article. Thus, I believe that it is legitimate to look to contemporary statements about the law (in addition to court decisions and statutes from other states and territories) in order to fully understand it and its impact. Nevertheless, one must be careful to not let subjective impressions of the law by private individuals override the text of the statute. That is to say, when interpreting “An Act in Relation to Service,” (and thereby determining if slavery was legal in Utah) one must start with an objective reading of the text and then move outward rather than the other way around. Certainly, variance between the text and people’s later interpretation of the statute can provide valuable insights into servitude in Utah. Indeed, I think that any such variance is an incredibly important topic of study if we are to understand the entire picture of African servitude in the Territory. Still, it must be remembered that what people perceived about the law and what the law actually said are in fact two different issues, and it is the text of the law which is paramount.

Nate has brought up many interesting points in his review of my article. I appreciate his suggestion that I look to the Territorial library to find possible sources for the law. I readily acknowledge that that the connection I have created between “An Act in Relation to Service” and other contemporary Northern laws is circumstantial rather than direct. While a review of books in the Territorial library would only create more circumstantial evidence, the more evidence the merrier.

Nate has also brought up a number of questions about how the law was perceived and implemented. These can be placed in three categories; 1. What legislators meant the law to accomplish, 2. How the law was actually put into practice, and 3. How individuals perceived the law afterwards. For instance, it is indisputable that many individuals in Utah continued to refer to African servants as slaves, including the servants themselves! I must confess that this fact has troubled me, although I did not have the space to fully address it in my article. However, I do not believe that it is impossible to harmonize these statements with the text and purpose of the law as I have interpreted it.

As I stated above, if one is trying to determine the legality of chattel slavery in Utah, the text of the law must take precedence. Of course, from a historian’s standpoint, the subjective intent of the legislators is also a vital question, and is to a certain extent entwined with an objective interpretation of the law considering its sometimes vague wording. For this reason I tried to explore both issues in conjunction in my article. Nevertheless, there is certainly more to learn although documents about the drafting of the law have so far proved elusive. I also highly encourage further research into each of the above categories in order to give a broader picture of African servitude in the Great Basin. At this point, rather than definitively answer the questions posed by Nate, I would like to list several considerations which I believe are important for anyone attempting to investigate these questions and harmonize them with the text of “An Act in Relation to Service.”

1. In the law, words have objective meaning while everyday language is often subjective. In my article, I have given the term “slave” a distinct legal definition as it was understood at the time: an individual who is owned as a piece of personal property or a chattel, and whose status is hereditary. This does not mean that everyday people used this term in such a precise manner. Indeed, the difference between a “slave” and an “involuntary servant,” although real, was highly nuanced, and was perhaps not readily apparent to the average person. For example, as I point out in the article, Brigham Young was confused about the legal status of African servants in New York, and some Mormons may have been similarly confused about the status of African servants in Utah. Further, “involuntary servitude” was certainly “slave-like” when compared to the freedom enjoyed by the average citizen. Indeed, any form of employment outside of “free labor” (such as indentured servitude) may appear “slave-like” even though it is not actually slavery as previously defined. Even today, people will often refer to a particularly onerous employment situation as slavery when they actually mean that it is “slave-like.” Thus, the Saints, many of whom detested slavery anyway, may have continued to refer to African servants as slaves in order to make a point. Or, they may have continued to use a short and familiar term in order to describe a similar though legally distinct status.
2. The expansion of African slavery in the Territories was THE main source of national conflict from the end of the Mexican War through the 1850s and resulted in the Civil War. Beginning with the Compromise of 1850, the Territories had enjoyed the ability to make decisions in regard to slavery for themselves thanks to the Popular Sovereignty ideology of Lewis Cass and Stephen Douglas. Yet this did not end the struggle and in some ways intensified it.

As I argue in my article, the Mormons were keenly aware of this ongoing rift between the North and South and understood that taking a firm position in regard to slavery either way could materially affect their drive for statehood. “An Act in Relation to Service” created a system that tried to bridge the gap. In it, African Americans slaves did not continue as legal chattels, but neither were they immediately freed. At the same time, people in Utah (particularly those in leadership positions) had an incentive to keep the status of bonded African-Americans somewhat obscure in order to play upon biases back East and gain support for statehood from both sides. Consequently, it is entirely possible that the language used to describe African servants in the aftermath of the law’s passage was part of a deliberate political calculation. However, in 1857, the situation became even more complex.

Early that year, the Supreme Court handed down the infamous Dread Scott decision. Among other things, the decision ostensibly forced all U.S. Territories to legally recognize the institution of slavery within their borders. Two years later, this was compounded by attempts by Congress to create a federal slave code. It is currently unknown how the Saints reacted to these seismic shifts in national policy. For instance, in New Mexico Territory, the legislature created an explicit slave code in 1859 despite the fact that there were fewer than 20 African slaves in the Territory. It seems likely that this was meant to avoid greater oversight from  Congress in the form of a national slave code. In contrast, the Utah Legislature made no changes to “An Act in Relation to Service.”

But that same year in a famous exchange, the newspaperman Horace Greeley asked Brigham Young if there were slaves in Utah, and Young replied that there were. Greeley then asked an interesting question. He asked Young if the laws of the Territory recognized the institution of slavery. This may have been in recognition of the fact that there were small numbers of African slaves in many places where slavery was illegal, such as Oregon Territory. To this, Young cryptically replied “Those laws are printed…you can read them for yourself. If slaves are brought here by their owners in the states, we do not favor their escape from the service of their owners.” But when asked if Utah would be a slave state or a free state, Young clearly stated that Utah would be a free state when admitted to the Union.1

I do not have time in this response to fully explore these statements. In fact, I am considering writing an article on the subject. Yet certainly this interview reveals the knife edge upon which Young and the Latter-day Saints walked in regard to slavery, particularly after Dred Scott and the evisceration of Popular Sovereignty. It is possible that this exchange reveals a fundamental change in Utah’s policy towards slavery in the wake of Dread Scott. But considering the skill with which Young dodged the question of slavery’s legality, it may not. Indeed, Young’s statement that the Mormons did not favor the escape of slaves could refer to a system of involuntary servitude as well as slavery, or may just have been a way of saying that Utah would comply with the Fugitive Slave Law. In either case, considering the enormous change in both local and national circumstances from 1852 until 1859, it should not be used to interpret “An Act in Relation to Service” as originally written. All uses of the word “slave” after 1852 to describe servitude in Utah should likewise be subjected to such contextual scrutiny.

3. People do not always follow the law the way that it has been written. Nevertheless, this does not change the content of the law nor its meaning. It simply means that people do not observe the law. It is therefore entirely possible that individuals continued to keep African slaves in a state of slavery once they reached Utah despite the requirements of the law. This would not be at all unusual and occurred in many other places throughout the United States.
4. Each legislator has his own reasons for supporting a piece of legislation, and even in Territorial Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young, there was such a thing as compromise.

Again, I appreciate this opportunity and forum for discussion.

Christopher Rich

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1 Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey, from New York to San Francisco, in the Summer of 1859, 1860, pp. 211-12.