Responses: Patrick Mason on David Pulsipher on Mormon Civil Disobedience

This post continues the JI’s occasional “Responses” series and contributes to the August theme of 20th Century Mormonism. Semi-regular guest and friend of the JI Patrick Mason, Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont, contributes this installment.

Review of David Pulsipher, “Prepared to Abide the Penalty’: Latter-day Saints and Civil Disobedience,” JMH 39:3 (Summer 2013): 131-162.

Pop quiz: Which group maintained the longest civil disobedience movement in American history, and the first such movement not to descend into violence? Since you’re reading a Mormon history blog, the question is a bit like asking who’s buried in Grant’s tomb. Yet even with the prodigious output of scholars working on Mormon related topics in recent years, there are relatively few offerings that not only give us new details but also really help us see Mormonism through a new perspective. David Pulsipher’s recent JMH article is one of those.

I should reveal my biases up front: David is a good friend, and the two of us are (slowly) working together on a book-length treatment of a Mormon theological ethic of peace. So I’m naturally inclined to say nice things about him and his work. This post will be no exception. The basic historical trajectory of Pulsipher’s article, covering the twenty-eight years from the first federal anti-polygamy legislation until the Manifesto, doesn’t cover any particularly new ground for students of Mormon history. It’s what Pulsipher does in covering that ground that is innovative. In a subfield that is always striving for relevance to broader themes and narratives, Pulsipher shows persuasively that Mormon polygamists (mostly the male priesthood leadership) anticipated many of the strategies that would be employed in the twentieth century by nonviolent civil disobedience movements led by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The Mormon case demonstrates how nonviolent social movements can “emerge from unexpected quarters” (134). More significantly, I think, the article shows how Mormon history profits from engagement with political theory–plenty of John Rawls here, in easily digestible form–and that Mormonism can contribute to and substantially nuance established political theory.

Pulsipher begins with definitions. The Latter-day Saints’ nineteenth-century civil disobedience, like that of later theorists and practitioners, had three key characteristics: “(1) a fundamental distinction between just and unjust laws, (2) a conscientious, public, and nonviolent breach of an unjust law, seeking to change that law either through moral suasion or by frustrating its enforcement, and (3) fidelity to the rule of law generally, demonstrated by a willingness to obey just laws and to submit to the legal penalties for disobeying unjust laws” (138).

A typically telling illustration of the Mormons’ approach is offered by John Taylor, who relates being brought into court to give evidence in a polygamy trial: “I was asked if I believed in keeping the laws of the United States. I answered Yes, I believe in keeping them all but one. What one is that? It is that one in relation to plurality of wives. Why don’t you believe in keeping that? Because I believe it is at variance with the genius and spirit of our institutions–it is a violation of the Constitution of the United States, and it is contrary to the law of God.” Taylor then said that he was “prepared to abide the penalty” of taking such a stance. (144)

Pulsipher also traces the Latter-day Saints’ twentieth-century retreat from the civil disobedience and in some ways their own history. He offers several compelling reasons for why the heritage of civil disobedience didn’t take hold in twentieth-century LDS culture: its failure to achieve its explicit purpose (to preserve plural marriage); the wide unpopularity of that proximate purpose, increasingly among the Saints themselves; Mormons’ shift to emphasize loyalty to the nation and their excellence in Victorian moral virtues; the continued use of the rhetoric and strategies of civil disobedience by Fundamentalist LDS groups; and the church leadership’s conservative reaction to the “disrespect for law and order” characteristic of the late 1960s.

But not all is lost: Pulsipher intriguingly provides an extended quote from a 2009 speech at BYU-Idaho in which Elder Dallin H. Oaks glowingly approved of a “national anti-government movement” led by a Mongolian woman (161). The lesson here is that Mormons are just like other Americans–we like civil disobedience, especially in retrospect, when it achieves goals we deem worthy, and castigate it as unpatriotic and dangerous when applied toward goals we don’t share.

I take minor exception to one small point made in the article. Pulsipher demonstrates persuasively how the Latter-day Saints relied upon biblical, not American, precedents in justifying their civil disobedience–Daniel, not Thoreau, was their archetype. Their remarkable persistence in the face of increasingly overwhelming pressure was rooted in large part in their millennial faith that Christ would rescue them from their oppressors. It is true, no doubt, that nineteenth-century Mormons had a more robust premillennialist outlook than did Martin Luther King, as Pulsipher points out. But black civil rights workers at the grassroots level–those without doctorates from liberal northeastern seminaries–carried their movement out in prophetic, ecstatic biblical tones.”[1] Twentieth century southern black millennialism no doubt looked different than nineteenth-century Mormon millennialism. But both the Mormons’ resistance to federal anti-polygamy law and grassroots southern blacks’ resistance to Jim Crow arguably drew more deeply from the Hebrew prophets than from the American liberal tradition.

For those of us who know David, this article displays the quality of his mind and his character. It is expertly researched, with strong documentation. It is perceptive and measured in tone. It is fair-minded, fully acknowledging the twentieth-century critique of civil disobedience but gently suggesting that those critiques were shaped by a particular historical moment. And the article reminds us, in the grand tradition of the vaunted southern historian C. Vann Woodward, that the past is strewn with “forgotten alternatives” for our (re-)discovery and (re-)consideration.[2]

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[1] David Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 102.

[2] See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1955]), chap. 2.

Guest Post: Patrick Mason, “God Bless America: Ezra Taft Benson’s Exceptionalist Patriotism”

[Another installment in this month’s series on “Mormonism and Politics,” this post is authored by Patrick Mason. Patrick, a friend of and mentor to many on the blog, is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, and his works include The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Post-Bellum South and (co-edited with David Pulsipher and Richard Bushman) War and Peace in Our Times: Mormon Perspectives. He is currently working on a biography of Ezra Taft Benson and a book on Mormon peace ethics. More recent family hobbies, supposedly related to peace ethics, include sneaking onto his former property with shovels and garbage bags to dig up grape vines and other shrubbery.]

The 1950s was a heady time for God in America.  Postwar enthusiasm and the fear of the surge of international “godless Communism” helped spark a national revival of religion, both privately and publicly.  Billy Graham emerged not only as the nation’s top revivalist but also as one of its biggest celebrities.  “In God We Trust” replaced the more secularly inflected “E Pluribus Unum” as the nation’s motto, and “under God” got plugged into the Pledge of Allegiance.

Dwight Eisenhower’s appointment of LDS apostle Ezra Taft Benson as Secretary of Agriculture both reflected and enhanced this national religious renewal.  Among students of Mormon history, Benson is well known for his association with the virulently anticommunist and arch-conservative John Birch Society.  Benson never formally joined the JBS, but his son Reed became a national coordinator for the society and Ezra publicly stated on many occasions the he was “convinced that The John Birch Society was the most effective non-church organization in our fight against creeping socialism and Godless Communism.”  (The best current treatment of this is in Greg Prince’s Dialogue article, here.)

Although his encounter with the John Birch Society in 1961 was significant for Benson, and in many ways helped define him and his public work for at least the entire decade of the 1960s, Benson did not need JBS founder Robert Welch to tell him that communism was evil or that America was God’s country.  (We sometimes forget that virtually everyone in America, John F. Kennedy included, was an ardent anticommunist during the Cold War.)  It’s more accurate to say that the John Birch Society was something like the salt that brought out the natural flavoring already inherent in Benson’s makeup.

Indeed, if we rewind nearly a decade before Benson ever heard of the society–several years before JBS even existed, in fact–we see an Ezra Taft Benson whose ardent patriotism is itself an article of faith.  In an address given to the BYU student body on December 1, 1952, immediately after he had accepted his Cabinet appointment (but about six weeks before the Eisenhower administration would begin), Benson spoke on the relationship between the LDS Church and politics.[1]

When Eisenhower approached him about the job, Benson immediately offered several objections, including the fact that he had supported Ike’s opponent in the Republican primary.  But one of Ike’s clinching arguments came when he told the apostle, “Surely you believe that the job to be done is spiritual.  Surely you know that we have the great responsibility to restore confidence in the minds of our people in their own government “ that we’ve got to deal with spiritual matters.”  Eisenhower thus framed government service as service to God, an argument that Benson would embrace whole-hog.  This helped him assuage any doubts he may have had about securing a leave of absence from his full duties as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, as he was simply temporarily exchanging one high-level calling from God for another.

In his address to the BYU students, Benson outlined some of his core principles.  Central to his worldview was the inviolable and unmatched sanctity of the God-given principle of freedom of choice.  For Benson, everything began with and came back to this one principle.  It would come to define his political philosophy, his economic philosophy, and his religious philosophy.  It also defined his patriotism.  He would travel to dozens of nations during his time as Secretary, but his worldview had already been shaped by his mission to Europe in 1946, where he oversaw LDS relief and humanitarian efforts, and where he personally witnessed both the devastation of war and the slow retreat of freedom behind the lowering Iron Curtain.

To the BYU students, he proclaimed, “It’s a great blessing to live in America.  It’s a great blessing to have the opportunity to enjoy the freedoms which are ours today.  I have seen people, thousands of them, who have lost the freedom which is ours. . . .  I’d rather be dead than lose my liberty. . . .  When our system is criticized, just keep in mind the fruits of the system, the great blessings that have come to us because of our American way of life.”

Much of Benson’s love for and faith in the divine mission and millennial destiny of America came from the Book of Mormon, a text he returned to time and again throughout his life.  He cited Book of Mormon passages about America being a “choice land” in every possible forum, from General Conference addresses to agricultural stump speeches to personal memos to President Eisenhower.  Standing at the apex of the long Latter-day Saint tradition of sacralizing America, Benson often expressed his conviction that the Constitution of the United States was a “sacred document,” its words “akin to the revelations of God.”  He was certain that “when the Lord comes, the Stars and Stripes will be floating on the breeze over this people.”[2]

The United States of America was not perfect, Benson conceded–the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal had eroded the sure foundations of the constitutional republic–but it was an essential part of God’s perfect plan for His children.  But no Saint ever had to apologize for being a true-hearted American.  God had indeed blessed America, and to honor the nation and its founding principles was to honor God.

Ezra Taft Benson was hardly the first nor the only Mormon to be an American exceptionalist or conservative constitutionalist.  But perhaps more than any other single individual, he solidified a “special relationship” between twentieth-century Mormonism and the nation, a relationship that he alone, by virtue of both his high ecclesiastical and public office, was in a position to broker, and which no one championed more loudly, publicly, and sometimes controversially, than he did, for nearly half a century.

[1] Ezra Taft Benson, ?The L.D.S. Church and Politics,? Brigham Young University devotional address, Dec. 1, 1952; typescript in L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, BYU.  This address is one of many Benson speeches that have been given new life on the internet by LDS conservatives; for instance here.

[2] Ezra Taft Benson, The Constitution:  A Heavenly Banner (Salt Lake City:  Deseret Book Co., 1986), 31, 33.

Book of Mormon into Darkness

Please join us in welcoming this guest post from Edward Blum, a recognized scholar of race and religion in U.S. history who has contributed to JI previously. Ed is associate professor of history at San Diego State University. He is the author of Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (2005), W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007), and most recently, co-author (with Paul Harvey) of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012). He is the co-editor (with Paul Harvey) of The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History (2012), (with Jason R. Young) The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections (2009), and (with W. Scott Poole) Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction (2005). Ed also blogs at Religion in American History and Teaching United States History, and last week attended his very first Mormon History Association conference in Layton, Utah.

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Has darkness ever overwhelmed you? Have you seen cities sink and communities set ablaze? Has a voice saved you? If you know the Book of Mormon, then you are familiar with the tale I tell. After hundreds of pages chronicling the ebbs and flows of civilizations, the narrative reaches a climax. In Palestine, Jesus Christ was crucified and buried. The world felt the reverberations. “Thick darkness” fell upon the land. Nothing could bring light, “neither candles, neither torches; neither could there be fire kindled with their fine and exceeding dry wood, so that there could not be any light at all.” The sounds of howling and weeping pieced the darkness. Sadness reigned.

It is difficult to overstate the drama and the beauty of the Book of Mormon’s rendering of these days. As one who watched silvery strands cloud the corneas of my infant son and darken his vision onto blindness, as one who takes the Christ story seriously in the depth of my soul, and as one who more and more considers the place of the sun and the moon, the land and the sea, in our religious imaginations, this scripture leaves me in tears. It also leaves me spinning about why the Book of Mormon is vital for American religious historians. It is not simply an artifact. It is also a treasure trove of ideas. To me, it should be required reading for anyone in my guild, and here are a few reasons.

First, the contents and the context feed one another. Most of us teach the context of Mormonism’s emergence. We teach about the second great awakening and the burned-over district, the dramatic tale of young Joseph Smith visited by God the Father, Jesus the Son, and Moroni the angel, and the complex and conflicted translating process. The content dramatizes the context and vice versa. When Joseph Smith translated the tale of the world going dark, he was sitting in darkness. When Smith described the various plates that had different forms of history written upon them, Smith was working from plates that held sacred histories at the same time George Bancroft was writing from paper on paper alternative histories of America. I am not suggesting that the context determined the content, not one bit. Rather, the drama of Smith’s translation seems heightened when we take seriously the text which he translated.

Second, the “wrapping” of the Book of Mormon can be stunningly interesting. There was not one Book of Mormon, but several even from the beginning. As Laurie Maffly-Kipp notes in her introduction to the Penguin edition, slight changes from the 1830 to the 1840 edition were crucial. The 1830 version used the word “white” to refer to the Lamanites. The 1840 version used “pure.” It was the 1830 version that became “the” wording for more than a century. Just as the distinction between “light” and “white” is crucial when we think of how Smith’s first vision is textually rendered versus how it is visually displayed, the difference between “white” and “pure” has been crucial too. Following the 1978 declaration to end the priesthood ban on black men, the 1981 edition inserted “pure.”

There have been other meaningful modifications as well, and not all textual. We know of the new subtitle, “Another Testament of Jesus Christ,” but there was also the inclusion of imagery. The Book of Mormon I grabbed from a hotel in 2007, which was my first introduction to the book, has eight images after an introduction and the testimonies. Heinrich Hofmann’s “The Lord Jesus Christ” looks slightly down and to our right, perhaps directing with his eyes to turn the page. (interestingly enough, it is a Hofmann painting of Jesus that “frames” Thomas S. Monson’s online biography, an image he claims to have had since the 1950s). On the next page of this Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith looks to the left, as if back at Jesus. Then there is Lehi, Alma, Samuel the Lamanite, and finally John Scott’s “Jesus Christ visits the Americas” and Tom Lovell’s “Moroni buries the Nephite record.” Bulging biceps and earnest prayer mark these paintings. The images frame the text, providing readers a narrative before the narrative. A visual arc precedes the textual arc. What is not there is fascinating too. There is no “first vision” so God the Father is not viewed in human form. Reading these images offer another layer of reading the Book of Mormon.

Finally, the arguments against reading the Book(s) of Mormon seem weak to me. It may be the case, as Terryl Givens has argued, that few Americans read the Book of Mormon in the nineteenth century. But that is true of lots of books and other texts. How many fugitive slave narratives went unread? Emily Dickinson’s poetry was kept private. Moreover, some pretty important Americans did read the book, including Brigham Young.

It is too easy to quote Mark Twain to explain away the book. To be blunt, there is a lot of nineteenth-century writing that felt like “chloroform in print.” Most of my students dislike Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin because it is too long and too detailed. Moby-Dick is so full of symbol, symbols, and symbolism that it often feels like the whale itself: too massive to comprehend. Readers can just as easily get lost searching for the white whale as they are following the Nephites, Lamanites, Jaredites, and all the other “ites.”

What I love about the Book of Mormon is that Smith and the writers were willing to tarry where Moby-Dick’s “Ishmael” was not. Near the beginning of Melville’s work, the one we can call “Ishmael” stumbles into a “Negro” church. There, he hears a sermon about “the darkness of blackness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing.” Ishmael “backed out.” To him, it was a “trap.”

When we read the Book of Mormon, we willingly enter the “trap.” The darkness descends; the world weeps. But then a voice calls; a body appears; we touch it and listen to his teachings. Then, we are told to sing. Perhaps Mark Twain’s boredom (and ours) tells us a lot more about his (and our) sacred (in)sensitivities and less about Smith or the Book of Mormon.

Women’s History Month at the JI: Thoughts on Elizabeth Kane (Smith)

By Alex D. Smith

“To be burned unread if I die, unless Tom cares to read it. No one else. Mind! I will haunt any one who does!

1. D. K.

I have waited with eager anticipation for Elizabeth Dennistoun Kane to fulfill this threat inscribed on the first page her 1860 diary. Elizabeth, if you are listening, at your convenience.

I appreciate the opportunity to participate in the Juvenile Instructor’s Mormon women’s history month by giving brief and informal tribute to a woman and friend whom I greatly respect and who has shaped my understanding of the value of personal record-keeping. My unabashed objective with the space below is to encourage the reading of Elizabeth’s published papers, rather than to convey information about her.

When asked to recommend a book on Mormon history or even just history in general to an interested uninitiated reader, among my first choices are always Elizabeth Kane’s Twelve Mormon Homes or A Gentile’s Account of Life in Utah’s Dixie. Either of these books–the former a series of accounts about Elizabeth’s winter 1872­­-1873 trip with her husband and two sons from Salt Lake City to St. George, published during her lifetime by her father, and the latter a more recent transcription of her journal during the months staying in St. George on the same trip–are sure to engage any reader. A non-Mormon with sympathies toward the church far less developed than her husband’s, Elizabeth is at once a careful observer, sensitive interviewer, and a capable (sometimes profound) writer.

In her more famous Twelve Mormon Homes, Elizabeth describes the homes of families of members of the church she stayed with while on the journey south from Salt Lake to St. George. Traveling in company with Brigham Young and others, Elizabeth’s narrative of the trip contains descriptions of the prophet not found elsewhere, including anecdotes about Young inspecting the company’s carriages each morning wearing sealskin boots and a “hideous pair of green goggles”[1] and recounting his humorous interactions with Pahvant chief Kanosh, and providing Elizabeth’s own theories explaining the power of Young’s leadership over saints in the satellite settlements:

When we reached the end of a day’s journey, after taking off our outer garments and washing off the dust, it was the custom of our party to assemble before the fire in the sitting-room, and the leading “brothers and sisters” of the settlement would come in to pay their respects. . . . At these informal audiences, reports, complaints, and petitions were made; and I think I gathered more of the actual working of Mormonism by listening to them than from any other source. They talked away to Brigham Young about every conceivable matter, from the fluxing of an ore to the advantages of a Navajo bit, and expected him to remember every child in every cotter’s family. And he really seemed to do so, and to be at home, and be rightfully deemed infallible on every subject. I think he must make fewer mistakes than most popes, from his being in such constant intercourse with his people. I noticed that he never seemed uninterested, but gave an unforced attention to the person addressing him, which suggested a mind free from care. I used to fancy that he wasted a great deal of power in this way; but I soon saw that he was accumulating it.[2]

Elizabeth’s lesser known journal from the months spent in St. George is, if anything, even more enlightening. As a non-Mormon, but with close access to Young and local church leaders, Elizabeth was uniquely situated to provide a perspective on aspects of early Mormon life–most notably plural marriage–that are as foreign to Mormon readers today as they were to her. While her journals include valuable insights into many areas of the St. George experience, from irrigation to the United Order (at a conference in the tabernacle devoted to the latter, Elizabeth writes, “I don’t understand myself exactly what is contemplated by the leaders, nor do the sheep of the flock, apparently, but they seem willing to follow in the direction indicated”[3]), the real strength of her account lies in her interviews with Mormon women. During the trip to Utah Territory, at Brigham Young’s recommendation and ostensibly for her husband’s health, Elizabeth stayed in the homes of a number of women involved in plural marriage relationships, and her questioning of them about the practice was seemingly as direct and dauntless as it was respectful. The record resulting from these exchanges, including such important topics as the relationships between wives in shared discipline of children, adds a piece to the puzzle of our understanding of Utah polygamy.

Elizabeth’s preconceptions of the Mormons prior to her trip to the West had been colored by her indignance at what she considered the derogatory coupling of her husband and Mormonism by her Philadelphia society. As a result of close interaction with the saints on this journey, her attitude toward the saints underwent a significant transformation which is honestly and touchingly revealed in her journal. Toward the end of her stay in St. George, Elizabeth wrote a note to her daughter Harriet, who had remained back East: “You will not understand how I have come to pity this people; for you know how hard it was for me to make up my mind to come among them and associate with them, even for the sake of benefiting Fathers health by this climate. I have written to you as a sort of penance for the hard thoughts and contemptuous opinions I have myself instilled of you.”[4] Earlier she wrote, “If I had entries in this diary to make again, they would be written in a kindlier spirit.”[5]

The concluding words of Elizabeth’s St. George journal are a more eloquent testimony to the power of her narrative than anything I might say:

On my return to Salt Lake City I spent a week or so at the Lion House, a step which I took as a public testimony to the little circle of those to whom my name is known, that my opinion of the Mormon women had so changed during the winter that I was willing to eat salt with them.

It would probably be more interesting to my father should I describe that household than any other in Utah. I am the only “Gentile woman” to whom every door within the walls was set freely open, and who was invited to the most familiar intercourse with Brigham Young’s wives and children. Yet that very fact seals my lips. I was not there as a newspaper correspondent, but as the wife of an honored and trusted friend of the head of the household. The members of that family have already suffered enough from the prying curiosity of strangers. . . .

The Mormon battle-ground is no longer in the Salt Lake Valley.

I found the best men and women, the most earnest in their belief, the most self-denying and “primitive Christian” in their behaviour clad in the homespun garments of the remote settlements.

It will all pass away soon enough, unless Persecution befriends them by making the young pass through the same purifying fires their elders traversed, burning out the impure and unsound in faith. Such industry as the Mormon religion inculcates, with such simple habits as prevail among the “Saints of the old Rock,” will too soon bring corrupting Wealth.

No use for us to “put down the Mormons.” The World, the Flesh, and the Devil sap earnestness soon enough.

“And I for one shall say, Alas!”[6]

[1] Elizabeth Wood Kane, Twelve Mormon Homes Visited in Succession on a Journey through Utah to Arizona. Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, Salt Lake City, UT: 1974, p. 5. Young’s hideous green riding glasses may be seen on display in the Presidents of the Church exhibit in the LDS Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, though sadly with less colorful language on the identifying label.

[2] Ibid., 101.

[3] Norman R. Bowen, ed., A Gentile’s Account of Life in Utah’s Dixie, 1872-73: Elizabeth Kane’s St. George Journal. Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, Salt Lake City, UT: 1995, pp. 155-156.

[4] Ibid., 170.

[5] Ibid., 168.

[6] Ibid., 177-179.

HELP WANTED! International Mormon Studies Book Project

Friend of JI and all-around awesome person Melissa Inouye has initiated a wonderful project. Can you help?

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As Mormonism continues to develop internationally, so too does the field of Mormon studies. More and more foreign scholars are looking to do work in the area, but often lack the requisite resources. The International Mormon Studies Book Project is a new effort to provide critical resources for developing Mormon studies internationally by purchasing books to form a base Mormon studies collection at institutions where scholars have demonstrated a keen interest in doing research on Mormonism. Currently, institutions interested in partnering with the IMS Book Project span the globe, from Asia to Australia to Europe. The first two IMS Book Project collections are slated for donation to Jianghan University) in Wuhan, China, and the newly formed French Institute for Research on Mormonism (Institut Français pour la Recherche sur le Mormonisme) in Bordeaux, France.

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Black History Month at the JI: “Tainted Blood” (O’Donovan)

“Tainted blood” – The Curious Cases of Mary J. Bowdidge and Her Daughter Lorah Jane Bowdidge Berry

Connell O’Donovan January 2013

In September 1885, Joseph Edward Taylor, First Councilor in the Salt Lake Stake Presidency, contacted LDS President John Taylor (no relation) regarding the curious case of “a young girl” (she was 20) residing in the Salt Lake 18th Ward named Lorah Jane Bowdidge Berry. Berry and Hyrum B. Barton, son of a pioneering Salt Lake family originally from England, had fallen in love and began to make plans for a temple marriage or sealing “probably in the still functioning Salt Lake Endowment house. However, as Taylor explained to the church president, “the question of jeopardizing his [Barton’s] future by such an alliance has caused a halt.” The “jeopardy” that the already-married Hyrum Barton faced was that this bigamous marriage would be to a young woman “whose mother was a white woman but whose father was a very light mullatto [sic]” as Councilor Taylor reported. Taylor had written to Pres. John Taylor to request an exemption from the LDS policy at that time of not allowing women or men of black African descent to enter LDS temples to participate in what they consider to be sacred ordinances necessary to salvation and exaltation in the Celestial Kingdom, specifically the endowment ritual and the eternal marital sealing ceremony. As Taylor further explained to his church superior, “The girl is very pretty and quite white and would not be suspected as having tainted blood in her veins unless her parentage was known.” In addition, Lorah J. B. Berry herself was adamantly requesting permission to be endowed for herself and then sealed for eternity to Barton on the basis of two known precedents, which she invoked to the Salt Lake Stake Presidency.

Although I can find no reply from President John Taylor to Lorah Bowdidge Berry’s petition for an exception to church policy, we learn later that, despite the precedents cited by her, it was denied. Who was Lorah Jane Bowdidge Berry and how did she come to need an exemption from the LDS temple ban due to her “tainted” racial background? A thorough answer must start with Lorah’s mother. Mary J. Bowdidge[1] was born March 3, 1836 in the town of St. Sampson on the Isle of Guernsey, a British Crown dependence just off the coast of Normandy, France. She was the third of seven children born to John Bowdidge Jr. and Alice Smith. John (1803-1878), a stonecutter and butcher by trade, was a native of Wooton Despain, Dorset, England  and was a mean alcoholic and career criminal as well. Alice Smith (1808-1860) was a native of Lime Regis, also in Dorset, and worked as a dress maker to help provide finances for their large family.

A year after Mary was born the family moved to the Isle of Jersey, residing first in St. Saviour then St. Helier. When Mary was eight, according to Utah Mormon descendants of the family, her father died in February 1844. In fact, John Bowdidge Jr. was arrested then in St. Helier for burglary of “corn, oats, &c” and was sentenced to prison for seven-year term on April 23, 1844.[2] Now exclusively using the surname of Burridge (instead of Bowdidge), John was transported to a penal colony on Norfolk Island, between Australia and New Zealand. After one year of hard labor there, he was transferred to Tasmania. He was continually rearrested and punished for public drunkenness, altercations, and using obscene language. In one case he and a group of drunken women assaulted another woman during a row. The other women were discharged but witnesses insisted that John Burridge kicked and struck the woman “about the head and face.” In the midst of this, the 40 year-old Burridge married (bigamously?) 19 year-old Elizabeth Geard and had twelve children by her, in between various further prison sentences. He died in Richmond, Tasmania on November 17, 1878.[3] It is very unlikely that the Bowdidges of Jersey knew of their Burridge half-siblings on another island some ten thousand miles away.

Meanwhile, back on Jersey, Alice Bowdidge and her children encountered Mormonism in 1847 and she and the five youngest children, including Mary, converted, with Alice and daughter Mary being baptized first in the family on November 19, 1847. The Bowdidges then began migrating to Utah piecemeal over the next decade and a half. However Mary G. Bowdidge, now a dressmaker like her mother, left Jersey and first moved to Paris, France where she married Theofil Manuel Soujet (allegedly a judge) about 1858. They had one daughter named Alice E. Soujet in 1859, either in Paris or in London.[4] (Alice Soujet would later marry a man named James Crow in 1879 and then James Tyler Little in Salt Lake in 1882 as his first plural wife. Little was the son of Feramorz Little, Brigham Young’s nephew and business partner.)

Theofil M. Soujet allegedly died in 1909, according to family tradition, but the 1861 Census of Grouville, Jersey (p. 27) lists Mary “Sauge” as already a widow, living with her brother John “Bowridge,” and her two year-old daughter, Alice Sauge. A year or so later, Mary and her baby girl (using her maiden surname Bowdidge rather than Soujet), plus her sister Sarah and niece Emily Bowdidge left Jersey, sailing first to America and then crossing the plains to Utah no later than the spring of 1863. Although they are not listed in any known pioneer company, they do appear in Perpetual Emigrating Fund records for the year 1863, and remained indebted to that fund until their deaths.[5] However, both of Mary’s obituaries report that she came to Utah in 1865, which is certainly incorrect.[6]

Sometime before March 1864 Mary met and married her second non-Mormon husband in Salt Lake City, a man named James Preston Berry, with William H. Hickenlooper, Bishop of both the Salt Lake Fifth and Sixth Wards officiating.[7]

Scandalously for the time, Mary’s new husband was of mixed race. With this marriage and subsequent conjugal relations, Mary Bowdidge Berry committed a crime in Utah territory, and two great sins within the LDS Church. Her first sin was in marrying a man of African descent, something Brigham Young had forbade since 1847, when he instigated the priesthood and temple ban policies. Then she committed a crime when she had sexual relations with her mixed-race husband. Utah’s 1852 law that legalized African and Native American slavery in Utah also expressly dictated that “if any white person shall be guilty of sexual intercourse with any of the African race, they shall be subject–to a fine of not exceeding one thousand dollars–and imprisonment, not exceeding three years.”[8] Lastly, Mary Bowdidge’s second sin was to bear children by a person of African descent, likewise declared as a sin by Brigham Young on December 3, 1847; “when they mingle seed it is death to all,” Young proclaimed, for “the law is their seed shall not be amalgamated.” Young then also affirmed that this was such a profound sin that forgiveness and salvation could only occur by blood atonement–white spouse, black spouse, and all their mixed-race children would have to be killed with their own consent and by priesthood authority, for this sin to be covered by the soteriological atonement of Jesus.[9]

But just how black was James Preston Berry–or was he even of any (recent)[10] African ancestry at all? Joseph E. Taylor, of the Salt Lake Stake Presidency, described James Preston Berry as “a very light mullatto,” and “about 1/6 Nigger from his appearance.” However others were unaware of Berry’s African ancestry, and Mary Bowdidge herself denied knowing of it at the time of her marriage.

Berry himself was employed as a hairdresser and barber in the company of Russell, Harris & Berry, located on the south side of 100 South, between Main and Commercial Streets in Salt Lake, about where the Bennion Jewelers Building now stands.[11] An 1869 photograph of the California House, located at the same address, shows a barber pole nearby, so Russell, Harris & Berry may have been associated with that hotel.[12] Note that free men of African descent had extremely few skilled employment options at that time, and many middle-class African American men were employed as barbers and hairdressers.[13] I can find no further information on co-owner, J. T. Harris, but the third co-owner was Robert Anderson Russell (1812-1879), and he was a white Mormon who remained in Utah until his death.[14]

Unfortunately little more is known about James Preston Berry’s history. A “mulatto” named James Berry was enumerated as the servant of the Los Angeles County Clerk in the 1860 Census. He was 32 years old and had been born in Maryland. The County Clerk, John W. Shore, was also 32 and was born in Virginia.[15] Otherwise we are left only with questions about his identity.

The Berrys resided in the Salt Lake 14th Ward, on 300 S. between 100 and 200 West (near what is now the Peery Hotel and Capitol Theatre). Their bishop was Abraham Lucas Hoagland (father-in-law of George Q. Cannon and grandfather of apostle Abraham Hoagland Cannon). Some nine or ten months after their marriage, Mary Bowdidge Berry gave birth to their first daughter, Lorah Jane Bowdidge Berry, on January 15, 1865. Bishop Hoagland blessed baby Lorah on March 21.[16]

Lorah’s Birth and Blessing Record, Salt Lake 14th Ward

A year after this, James Preston and Mary Bowdidge Berry conceived another child, and Mary “Polly” Elizabeth Bowdidge Berry was born in the Salt Lake 14th Ward on October 21, 1866. Polly’s birth is the last time we hear of James Preston Berry until the race controversy some twenty years later. Certainly by 1870, he was no longer residing with his wife and two daughters. The 1870 Census of Salt Lake enumerates Mary “Bersy” (instead of Berry) and her daughters Alice (Soujet, but listed as “Bersy” also), Lora, and Mary. And now they were residing in the Salt Lake 13th Ward, on the east side of State Street, where Edwin D. Woolley was the bishop.

Whether second husband James Preston Berry had died or abandoned her, about a year later, in 1871, Mary Bowdidge Soujet Berry married her third non-Mormon husband, James (Frank?) Smith. He is as mysterious a man as her second husband (mostly because of his common name), and their marriage also became a race controversy in the church. James and Mary Bowdidge Smith had a son born on July 10, 1872 in Salt Lake City, and he was named James Frank Smith. (He is once listed as “James F. Smith Jr.” which leads me to believe his father may have also had the middle name of Frank.)

By 1880, the enigmatic James Smith had apparently passed away, for “Mary S[oujet]. Smith” was enumerated as a widow with her four children, all listed with the surname of “Saugé”, including her eight year-old son, “James F. Saugé” [sic- Smith]. (Note that the 1880 Census also reported that Lorah and Polly’s father, James Preston Berry, was a native of Georgia.)

Lorah Jane Bowdidge Berry was baptized LDS on August 5, 1884, at the age of 19.[17] She had probably begun courting Hyrum B. Barton by this time, and may have finally converted in preparation for marriage. Her sister Polly seems never to have gotten baptized LDS. However, her half-brother, 12 year-old James Frank Smith, was also baptized on the same day as Lorah. The family was now living at 120 North Main Street (just across the street westward from where the LDS Church History Library now stands), and young James had begun working as a messenger delivery boy for the trunk manufacturing company of Meredith, Gallagher & Jones at 65 South Main.[18]

Hyrum B. Barton

The young and already married Hyrum B. Barton (1852-1901, native of England) lived with his Scottish wife Georgina Crabb Barton just a couple of blocks north of the Berrys, on Oak Street (which is now the extension of North Main Street where it enters the Marmalade District). The Bartons had originally settled in Kaysville, a town halfway between Salt Lake and Ogden to the north. Then John Barton had died in 1874, and the family moved into Salt Lake City so the boys could get jobs to support the family, some following their father in the carpenter’s trade, some going into the mercantile business, and Hyrum, although apprenticed as a carpenter, became a clothing merchant and then a real estate agent in the mid-1880s. Having met, probably as neighbors, Hyrum Barton and Lorah Berry fell in love and began preparing for a plural marriage, although the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882 now prohibited bigamous “unlawful cohabitation.”

Joseph E. Taylor, first counselor of the Salt Lake Stake Presidency, later reported that about February 1885 (before they married), Hyrum Barton was told that Lorah Berry “had negro blood in her veins.” Taylor in fact knew James Preston Berry well as “he had done my barbering for years.” Barton left and Taylor immediately informed Barton’s bishop, Orson F. Whitney (of the Salt Lake 18th Ward)[19] about Barton and Berry’s intention of marrying. Taylor and Whitney then sent for William H. Hennefer (1823-1898), a Mormon pioneer of 1851, and a barber whose business was at 141 South Main.[20] When Hennefer arrived at Joseph E. Taylor’s home, the stake president, Angus M. Cannon (nephew of Pres. John Taylor and younger brother of George Q. Cannon of the First Presidency), happened to be visiting Taylor, although Cannon was hiding “on the underground” at the moment from federal authorities. After enquiries from Whitney, Taylor, and Cannon, William Hennefer “corroborated” Taylor’s belief that James Preston Berry indeed had African ancestry.

Joseph E. Taylor, 1st Counselor, Salt Lake Stake Presidency

In the meantime, Hyrum Barton also began his own investigation, starting with William Hennefer. Barton claimed however, that Hennefer told him that “he could not tell by looks that Mr. Berry had any colored blood in him,” which differs from what Hennefer told Taylor, Whitney, and Cannon. Barton then “went to others who were well acquainted with Mr. Berry but they all told me that there was nothing in his appearance to cause them to think of such a thing.” This included Bishop Hickenlooper, who had married Lorah’s parents back in 1864, and who “stated positively that he had no evidence that there was any negro blood in Mr. Berry’s veins.” When even Mary Bowdidge Berry “denied it” Hyrum felt satisfied that the rumors of Lorah Berry’s mixed-race background were false, and went forward with his marriage to Lorah in September 1885.[21]

Lorah Berry still wanted church sanction however and met with the Joseph E. Taylor, first counselor of the Salt Lake Stake Presidency, around August 1885 to petition him for a polygamous sealing, regardless of her racial makeup. Stake President Angus M. Cannon could not participate as he was now in prison at that time for unlawful cohabitation with his polygamous wives.[22] Thus Taylor reported that Lorah “came to me and talked upon the question of marriage.” To her dismay, Taylor flatly told her, “no Elder in Israel was justified before God in marrying her” because of her African ancestry and Mormonism’s policy of race-based discrimination.

Still, Lorah Berry must have strongly pressed Joseph E. Taylor on the issue, as he then forwarded Berry’s request to the church president. On September 5, 1885, Joseph E. Taylor informed president John Taylor by letter “of a young girl residing in the Eighteenth Ward of the City by the name of Laura [sic] Berry whose mother was white but whose father was a very light mullatto [sic].” “It appears,” he continued, “that she has fallen in love with brother Bar[t]ons Son and it is reciprocated.”

But the question of jeopardizing his future by such an alliance has caused a halt. She now desires to press her claim to privileges that others who are tainted with that blood have received.

Lorah Berry then recited two precedents she knew about, in which white Mormons had been endowed after marrying someone of mixed race. One precedent referred to was that of “Mrs. Jones Elder Sister.” Unfortunately no more information is given, other than that Mrs. Jones then resided in Logan. Given the context, it seems like her older sister had married a man of color but had still been allowed to be endowed, and possibly even sealed to him. Without further details, the commonality of the surname prevents further investigation into their identities. The second precedent of which Lorah Berry was aware was that of “Brother Meads” of the Salt Lake 11th Ward, who had married a “quadroon” and all their children were “very dark.” Further investigation has revealed that this was Nathan Meads (1823-1894) of England who married a southern woman of color named Rebecca H. Foscue. Rebecca Foscue had moved to Utah in 1860 and gotten baptized at 28 in 1861. Foscue, despite her mixed race, was then endowed and sealed to Meads in 1863, and they had six children, all but one of whom died young. Upon hearing these two cases, Joseph E. Taylor admitted, “I am cognizant of all these having received their endowments here.” But the question he now lay before his superiors was:

Can you give this girl any privileges of a like character? The girl is very pretty and quite white and would not be suspected as having tainted blood in her veins unless her parentage was known.[23]

Although no response from Pres. John Taylor is known to be extent, we do know that Hyrum B. Barton and Lorah Bowdidge Berry did get married later in September 1885, but without church consent, unleashing the church’s wrath upon the newlyweds. Lorah became immediately pregnant with their first of three children, Birdie Ethel Barton, who was born May 29, 1886. Now officially a bigamist, a year after Birdie’s birth, Hyrum Barton was also arrested by federal authorities for unlawful cohabitation and was sentenced on February 15, 1889 to three months’ imprisonment and a $100 fine.[24]

Less than six months after his release from the territorial penitentiary, with his legal crime now punished, the LDS Church turned to Hyrum Barton’s sins. Like his mother-in-law before him, Barton had not only married someone of African descent, but had also “mingled his seed” with his wife and they now had children as proof of his sins. Mary Bowdidge, who was merely a woman, had been allowed to remain a member of the LDS Church, although denied any further temple blessings. But here was a holder of the higher or Melchizedek priesthood who had committed these sins. And with higher authority came higher responsibility and accountability. Bishop Orson F. Whitney of the Salt Lake Eighteenth Ward held a Bishop’s Court to try Barton for his membership in the church. The charges were actually for adultery, but the “Bishops report stated that Sister Berry had negro blood in her veins” and “Bro. Barton had married her against counsel, and lived with her as wife,” in unapproved polygamy–thus adultery. After convening the court, the bishopric “disfellowshipped him from the Church for the offense.”

The case was then forwarded to Salt Lake Stake Presidency and High Council, and they convened to hear it on October 9, 1889. Angus Cannon, now out of prison, presided. The charge before the stake presidency was for “Disobeying counsel and breaking his oath of Chastity in going outside the law of God to take a plural wife.” Joseph E. Taylor reported all that had gone before regarding Lorah’s parents, and her African ancestry, along with the investigations he had done that confirmed it. Barton then recited his own investigations that differed in conclusion, and explained that having “satisfied myself upon that point” he went ahead and married Lorah Bowdidge Berry. Angus M. Cannon charged, “Bro. Barton deserts his first wife to marry this girl and takes her to wife.” This was actually false, because Barton continued to reside with his first wife as well and had two more children by her after his marriage to Lorah Berry. The stake presidency grilled Barton as to whom officiated at his illicit marriage in 1885, “but would not say any more than that it was performed in the 14th Ward, and that an Elder of the Church officiated.” After the hearing, the High Council voted to excommunicate Barton. He was also commanded to cease living with Lorah Bowdidge Berry Barton immediately, although he was to continue to support her and her daughter and “treat them kindly” but “not indulge in any sexual gratification if he desires mercy.”[25] However Barton did not comply and continued his marital relationship with Lorah, and she bore him three more children: Lorah “Lola” Denver, Lottie, and Tyler Hyrum Barton. Their first daughter, Birdie Ethel Barton, did not join the LDS Church, and serially married two non-Mormon men. Lottie must have died before 1910 and nothing more is known about her. But children Lorah Denver and Tyler Hyrum were both sealed to their spouses in the Salt Lake Temple, and Tyler certainly must have been ordained an Elder (a prerequisite for Mormon men to enter the temple), despite their also having “tainted blood”.

By 1893, Mary Bowdidge Smith had moved to 457 West 300 North. Two years later, it became Mary’s turn to challenge the church’s nearly 45 year-old racialist policies. With her son James F. Smith now baptized, Mary wished to have his father’s LDS ordinances performed by proxy, so that she could then be sealed to her third husband, and have their son sealed to them. However, when she approached Angus M. Cannon for a temple recommend, he refused to sign it “for the reason that she had married a man with negro blood in him and borne him children.” So she petitioned the First Presidency to overrule Cannon’s refusal, while also “denying at the same time that her first [sic- second] husband was part negro.”[26]

On August 22, 1895, apostle Franklin D. Richards reported in his diary that he met with the First Presidency (Wilford Woodruff, George Q. Cannon, and Joseph F. Smith), as well as Lorenzo Snow, Heber J. Grant, and John Henry Smith to discuss their the “ineligibility of any person having negro blood to receive the Priesthood or Temple ordinances.” Mary Bowdidge Smith’s request had come simultaneously with a petition from black pioneer Jane Elizabeth Manning James “to admit her to Temple ordinances.”[27] They reviewed Jane James’s request first. Joseph F. Smith brought up the case of Elijah Abel being ordained a Seventy and High Priest under Joseph Smith’s direction. George Q. Cannon denied that Joseph Smith ever did this and instead claimed that Smith taught, “the seed of Cain could not receive the Priesthood nor act in any of the offices of the priesthood” and “that any white man who mingled his seed with that of Cain should be killed,” thus preventing Cain’s descendants from ever holding LDS priesthood. (Cannon was wrong on both accounts, it was Brigham Young who taught these things instead.)

The Council’s secretary, George F. Gibbs, then introduced Mary Bowdidge Berry Smith’s “desire to be sealed” to her third husband, with her son James F. Smith standing in as proxy for the deceased husband and father, and based on her belief that her second husband was not “part negro.” However the Council agreed that “Mr. Berry was part negro” and George Q. Cannon felt that since Mary’s daughters “could not be admitted to the temple,” by the same token “it would be unfair to admit their mother and deny them this privilege.” Cannon also felt that any compromise on the policy “would only tend to complications” and though it best “to let all such cases alone” believing that in the end of it all, God would “deal fairly with them all.”[28]

Franklin D. Richards merely summarized the meeting: “also a <white> Sister who m[arried]. a negro man entreats for permission to receive her ordinances but is refused.” A month later however, Richards expanded and clarified:

Sister Mary Bowdige Berry Smith asks me what about & why Angus M. Cannon will not sign her recommend to the Temple to do work in connexion with her son James F. Smith by her 2nd [sic-third] husband that she may be sealed to his father & he to them because she married & had two dau’s by a former husband James Preston Berry who had negro blood in him [emphasis in original but added later in red ink][29]

So just like her son-in-law Hyrum Barton before her, not only were people of African descent prohibited from holding priesthood and participating in soteriological ordinances, but white Mormons who married people of African descent “tainted” themselves, and thereby permanently (or at least mortally) revoked their privileged status of potential priesthood and temple worthiness. Even if they later “repented” and married a white person. And in this case, even James Frank Smith, who was white and completely innocent in all of this, was denied being sealed to his white parents, a victim of collateral damage.

Five years after this fateful decision, Lorah and her mother Mary both died;  Lorah in March and Mary in December of 1900, both faithful members of the LDS Church.

James Frank Smith went on to become a lawyer, married a high society woman in the Salt Lake Temple and had several children by her. But, just like his grandfather, John Bowdidge/Burridge, he became an alcoholic and career criminal, specializing in embezzlement and passing bad checks, which led to time in jail.[30] In 1906 his wife sued him for divorce on the grounds of “non-support” and won the divorce, custody of their children, and monthly alimony.[31] The Mormon lawyer died in 1915 at the age of 42 while at Holy Cross Hospital from a perforated ulcer, likely due to his alcohol consumption. I am left to ponder if the callous decisions of church leaders coupled with institutional racism were at least partially responsible for James F. Smith’s rapid moral decline.

________

[1]  Later city directory sources give her middle initial as Mary G., possibly for Gardener, her maternal grandmother’s maiden name. Note that Mary’s youngest sister was named Alice Gardener Bowdidge (1843-1933).

[2]Prisoner Transport Record #18500, John Burridge or Bowdidge, ancestry.com (accessed July 18, 2010); scanned image in my possession.

[3] “Convict Department,” Launceston Examiner (Tasmania), June 2, 1849, 8; “Personal,” The Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania), February 26, 1919, 6; “Police Office “This Day,” The Courier (Hobart, Tasmania), March 18, 1857, 3; “Local Intelligence,” Colonial Times (Hobart), March 21, 1857, 3; “Hobart Town General Quarter Sessions,” The Courier, April 8, 1857, 3; and “Quarter Sessions,” The Mercury, April 10, 1857, 3; and “Family Notices-DEATHS,” The Mercury, November 21, 1878, 1.

[4] See Death Certificate for Alice Soje Little, January 4, 1928, Utah Department of Health, Office of Vital Records and Statistics, Series 81448, Entry 11467.

[5] Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company financial accounts, LDS Church History Library, CR 376 2, Reel 2, Folder 1, Ledger C, 579.

[6] “Death of Mary J. Smith,” Deseret News, December 7, 1900, 8; and “Dearth of Mrs. Smith,” Salt Lake Herald, December 8, 1900, 5.

[7] Salt Lake Stake High Council Minutes, October 9, 1889, quoted in Anonymous, Minutes of the Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1894-1899, (Salt Lake City: privately published, 2010) 35.

[8] Section 4, “An Act in Relation to Service,” Acts, Resolutions, and Memorials Passed by the First Annual-Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah, (Great Salt Lake City, Utah: Brigham H. Young, 1852), 80.

[9] December 3, 1847, Historian’s Office-General Church Minutes, 1839-1877, CHL CR 100 318, 6-7 (in the hand of Thomas Bullock).

[10] We now know that all of humanity is genetically of African descent. Therefore by “recent” Imean within the past 300 hundred years.

[11] 1867 Salt Lake City Directory, (G. Owens, 1867) 38.

[12] “S.L.C.-1st South St.” P-9, Classified Photograph Collection, Utah State Historical Society.

[13] See my discussion of this in my biography of Elder Walker Lewis.

[14] See his entry in the Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel database, online, http://history.lds.org/overlandtravels/ (accessed January 22, 2013).

[15] 1860 Federal Census of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, 56.

[16] Birth and Blessing Records, Salt Lake 14th Ward Record of Members, 1856-1909, Family History Library film #26695, 16/19.

[17] Hyrum B. Barton Family Group Sheet, Family Group Records Collection “ Patrons Section, 1924-1962, LDS Family History Library, film 412122.

[18] Robert W. Sloan, Utah Gazetteer and Directory (Salt Lake City: Herald Printing & Publishing Co., 1884) 210; R. E. Doublas, et al., Salt Lake City Directory for the Year Commencing Aug. 1, 1885, (San Francisco: U.S. Directory Publishing Co. of Cal., 1885) 219 and 272.

[19] The 18th Ward had been Brigham Young’s ward until his 1877 death, with his younger brother Lorenzo Dow Young as its bishop. After Lorenzo’s death, young Orson F. Whitney presided over the ward. It’s famous Gothic chapel, built in 1881, was located at 2nd Avenue and A Street. It then was dismantled in the early 1970s and reassembled on Capitol Hill as the White Memorial Chapel.

[20] Doublas, Salt Lake City Directory:1885, 162.

[21] Salt Lake Stake High Council Minutes, October 9, 1889, 34-35.

[22] “The Anti-Polygamy Law, Ex-Delegate Cannon’s Sentence Affirmed,” New York Times, December 15, 1885.

[23] Joseph E. Taylor to John Taylor, September 5, 1885, John Taylor papers, CHL, CR 1 180, Box 20, File 3; typed transcript in my possession.

[24] Andrew Jenson, Church Chronology: A Record of Important Events Pertaining to the History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1899) 150 (July 7, 1887), 171 (February 15, 1889), and 174 (April 30, 1889).

[25] Salt Lake Stake High Council Minutes, October 9, 1889, 34-35.

[26] Minutes of the Apostles, September 25, 1895, 34.

[27] Franklin D. Richards journal, August 22, 1895, CHL, MS 1215, vol. 45.

[28] Minutes of the Apostles, September 25, 1895, 34.

[29] Franklin D. Richards journal, September 25, 1895, CHL, MS 1215, vol. 45.

[30] “Lawyer is Accused,” Salt Lake Herald, July 27, 1905, 5; “Lawyer Accused of Crime,” Salt Lake Herald, July 21, 1906, 12; “Issues Another Bad Check,” Salt Lake Herald, July 22, 1906, 28; “Passes Worthless Check,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 6, 1906, 5 and September 9, 1906, 5; and “Police Court Glimpses,” Salt Lake Herald, September 22, 1908, 6.

[31] “News of the Courts,” Salt Lake Herald, September 1, 1906, 12.

Black History Month at the JI: “Nobody ever saw a Negro Mormon” (Reeve)

By Paul Reeve

In May 2012, Susan Saulny, a reporter for the New York Times published a story, “Black Mormons and the Politics of Identity,” an investigation into how black Latter-day Saints grappled with their decision between a Mormon Republican and a black Democrat in the 2012 presidential election. The online version of the story featured a “TimesCast” four minute video which included a fellow reporter from the Times interviewing Saulny about her story. The conversation began with an expression of “surprise” that there were in fact black Mormons for Saulny to interview. The exchange then entertained a bit of speculation over how many black Mormons there are in the United States, with a “very small number,” a “couple of thousand max,” and “500 to 2,000” offered as possibilities. The “TimesCast” did rightly note that the LDS Church does not keep racial statistics on its membership, so that the number of black Mormons is difficult to know.

Even still, a quick Google search may have yielded the fact that a 2009 survey of 571 Mormons conducted by the Pew Research Center, found that African-Americans comprised three percent of U.S. Church membership that year. If that survey percentage held true for the overall US Church membership, then there were around 180,000 black members in the United States in 2009. Even if we cut that number in half to account for variances in the way people self-identify versus official LDS membership reports, 90,000 black Mormons is significantly higher than a “couple of thousand max.” The Pew Center survey also found that one in ten converts to the faith was black. It noted that the percentage of white Mormons in the US was at 86%, an indication that US Mormonism is more racially diverse than mainline Protestant churches (91% white), Jews (95% white), and Orthodox Christians (87% white). Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Muslims were all much more racially diverse.1

As an historian, I immediately situated the “TimesCast” conversation within the chronological evolution of public perception regarding Mormons and race, something I want to trace in broad strokes as my contribution to the Juvenile Instructor’s celebration of Black History Month. At least two black men, Elijah Abel and Q. Walker Lewis, were ordained to the LDS priesthood in the first fifteen years of the Church’s history. Abel received his washing and anointing ordinances in the Kirtland Temple and Abel and Jane Manning James (another black convert), were baptized for deceased relatives in Nauvoo and the Logan temple respectively.

In the Church’s early years, then, the “surprise” for some outsiders was Mormon universalism and the lack of racial restrictions. Mormons allowed blacks to worship with them and that worship sometimes took place in strange ways. The first known African American to join the LDS Church was Black Pete in 1830, the year of the Church’s founding. By February 1831 The New York Albany Journal reported that among the Mormons in Ohio was “a man of color, a chief man, who is sometimes seized with strange vagaries and odd conceits.” In August of the same year, The Sun, a Philadelphia newspaper, announced that “The Mormonites have among them an African . . . who fancies he can fly.”

As one outside observer saw it, Mormon notions of equality may have contributed to their troubled sojourn in Missouri. He noted that Ohio Saints honored “the natural equality of mankind, without excepting the native Indians or the African race.” It was an open attitude that may have gone too far for its time and place. That same observer  suggested that the Mormon stance toward Indians and blacks was at least partially responsible for “the cruel persecution by which they have suffered.” In his mind the Book of Mormon ideal that “all are alike unto God,” including “black and white,” made it unlikely that the Saints would “remain unmolested in the State of Missouri.” In fact, accusations regarding Mormon plans to instigate slave rebellions and the fear of black Mormons arriving in Missouri to prey upon white women were among the charges leveled against the Saints during the Jackson County expulsion.

By the 1880s, however, public perception began to shift in the opposite direction. Some outsiders suggested that Mormons facilitated race mixing even as others questioned if black Mormons existed at all. In 1883, A. M. E. bishop, Henry McNeal Turner, visited Salt Lake City. His report noted racial boundary transgressions inherent in Mormonism. Turner described polygamy on the wane in Utah, but nonetheless congratulated the Mormons because “they are just as willing for their daughters to marry colored men as to marry white men.” “As there are no colored young ladies here all the colored young men marry white Mormon girls,” he noted, “nor are they driven from white society for it.” Polygamy, however, was a different matter. Turner suggested that black Mormons were banned from participating. A “colored Mormon appealed to Brigham Young . . . for permission to take another wife,” he said, but Young rejected the request. Young explained that “the negro race was under a curse” but that Jesus would return “soon” and remove the curse thus making it possible for “the negro Mormons” to “marry as many wives as they desired.” In this telling, interracial monogamy was approved, but black polygamy was not.

Other reports only added to the confusion. One account from Salt Lake City published in a Nebraska paper attempted to dispel misperceptions. It refuted the claim that “nobody ever saw a negro Mormon” and suggested that “[a]ny one interested can find a number of colored ‘Saints’ in Salt Lake City.” The story nonetheless clarified that the presence of black Mormons did not automatically signal that Mormons tolerated racial mixing: “Some few cases of miscezination [sic] have occurred in this territory, but public feeling amongst the majority is strongly opposed to such unions.” One 1882 story in the Los Angeles Herald announced that “there are negro Mormons in Utah, and that there have been colored followers of Brigham Young almost from the very foundation of the church.” It correctly reported that Young “made no distinction as to race, color or previous condition of servitude among his proselytes, but he had a prejudice against colored saints taking unto themselves white wives.” It then made an unsubstantiated claim that “more than one colored brother was ‘blood atoned’ for taking unto himself a white woman.” (I am fully aware of Thomas Coleman’s murder, here; the “blood atoned” accusation is unsubstantiated in my estimation). The following year a report from Nebraska said that “A dozen colored Mormons arrived last week at Salt Lake” while a year later a Minnesota paper wrote that three blacks had converted to Mormonism in Tennessee and left for Utah; it described them as “the first colored Mormons” the faith had known.

By the early 20th Century Mormon leaders only added to the muddle. They did their part to forget black Mormon pioneers, especially the priesthood of Elijah Abel and Q. Walker Lewis. Despite that reshaped memory, black Mormons continued to worship with their white counterparts across the course of the twentieth century and some black Saints continued to hold the priesthood. Elijah Abel’s son Enoch and grandson Elijah, Jr., received the Melchizedek priesthood in 1900 and 1935 respectively.

Black Mormons have always been a part of the Mormon story from its founding in 1830 to the present, most of that time without priesthood and full temple privileges, but black Mormons nonetheless. Integrated Sunday worship has been a hallmark of the LDS Church from its early days to 2013. Certainly Mormonism has a troubled racial past, marred by a priesthood and temple bans which evolved across the course of the nineteenth century, but if that is the only story historians tell, then we contribute to the false impression exhibited in the “TimesCast” interchange. For all of Mormonism’s troubled racial history, a ban on black membership and segregated Sunday services are not among them.

The chronological transition from universal priesthood and temples to segregated priesthood and temples and then back again needs to be integrated into the official Mormon narrative. Once that takes place, the lives of black Mormons can then be situated within a broader framework and we can begin to better understand the contributions of black pioneers, in all of their complexities–both before and after 1978, both in the U.S. and internationally–to the story of the Latter-day Saints. For the time being, I am pleased to join the Juvenile Instructor in celebrating Black History Month and in refuting the charge that nobody ever saw a black Mormon.

________

1 “A Portrait of Mormons in the U. S.,” http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Mormon/A-Portrait-of-Mormons-in-the-US.aspx (accessed 16 August 2012) .

Pioneer Prophet Roundtable: Turner Responds

John Turner wraps up the JI’s roundtable discussion of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.

Four-and-a-half years ago, during my initial research trip to Utah, I ventured down to Provo and had lunch with Spencer Fluhman and several of his students. Among them were David Grua and Chris Jones (and Stan Thayne, I think). The Juvenile Instructor was a newborn blog at the time. So it’s a bit surreal for me to have read the topical reviews of Pioneer Prophet over the past six weeks at this blog.

I love the field of Mormon history for many reasons. The rich sources. The voluminous scholarship. Most of all, I love the fact that so many people care about the Mormon past. This has some downsides. It makes the field contentious and testy. One need only read the “letters” section of the most recent Journal of Mormon History. Such contention, however, is more than outbalanced by the passion that so many individuals bring to their writing and to conversations about  Mormon history. That passion is contagious.

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The Earliest Written Account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

Connell O’Donovan is an independent researcher, genealogist, and historian of early Mormonism. He has generously shared the following material related to his volume of Augusta Adams Cobb Young’s life writings, forthcoming with the University of Utah Press.

In transcribing the scores of letters and drafts in the Augusta Adams Cobb files, archived in the Theodore Schroeder Collection on Mormonism at the Wisconsin Historical Society, I found an undated draft of a letter (PDF of the holograph document here), which may be the earliest written account of the massacre at Mountain Meadows in September 1857.[i] In preparation for publishing the Cobb letters next year through the University of Utah Press, I was elated to find the draft in question, written by Augusta’s daughter, Charlotte Ives Cobb, to her married sister in Boston, Mary Elizabeth Cobb Kellogg. Augusta Adams Cobb was the wife of Henry Cobb of Boston and Lynn, Massachusetts, when she was baptized LDS in 1832. In September 1843, Augusta separated from her husband, and left six of her eight children (plus one foster daughter), to accompany Brigham Young when he left his mission in Boston to return to Nauvoo. Immediately upon their arrival at church headquarters, Augusta was re-baptized and then sealed for time and eternity to Young with Joseph Smith officiating, despite not being civilly divorced from Henry. Charlotte, born in 1836, was then raised as Young’s stepdaughter, and migrated with her mother to Utah territory in 1848, in the Brigham Young company.[ii]

Charlotte Ives Cobb (Godbe Kirby), early 1860s. Courtesy of Utah State Historical Society.

Charlotte, considered one of the “reigning belles” of Salt Lake in the 1850s, was somewhat gifted musically, and on at least one occasion, played the piano for dignitaries visiting Young at the Lion and Beehive House compound.[iii] Charlotte resided upstairs in the Lion House in her own room toward the southwest end of the house, while mother Augusta inhabited two small rooms on the west side of middle story.

Although the letter draft in question is undated, from the contextual evidence it can be certainly dated between September 15 and 20, 1857, and I believe it was written either on the nineteenth or twentieth. Charlotte reported to her sister, “Capt Vanfleet attended our meeting last Sunday,” and then referred to speeches given by John Taylor and Brigham Young on the same occasion. Capt. Stewart Van Vliet, an old friend to the Mormons, arrived in Salt Lake City on September 8, 1857, bearing a letter from Gen. William S. Harney, ordering the Mormons to supply, by purchase, the Army troops who were on their way to the territory. On the tenth, Van Vliet requested of Young to see the “domestic workings of the ‘Peculiar Institution’” of polygamy, so Young took him to the Lion and Beehive Houses, and introduced the captain to “his numerous family of wives and children.” It is likely that both Augusta and Charlotte were there to meet the captain.[iv] Then on Sunday, September 13, Van Vliet was courteously asked to speak to the gathered Saints at the Bowery during their worship services. John Taylor and Brigham Young also spoke immediately thereafter. Given that Charlotte noted these three men spoke “last Sunday”, the latest she could have written this draft was therefore the following Sunday, September 20.

Having settled the general dating of the letter, here is a transcription in full (with the most pertinent section in bold):

My precious Sister Mary Lizza,

I have at length commenced a letter for you, and while I write I Sincerely pray that your dear hands (and yours only <none others>) may open this letter. My thoughts throng so rappidly towards you all that it is with difficulty I can express <any of> them clearly. But first I must try to tell you of the unbounded love I feel. as I ever have felt for you and also your little chereb’s,[v] And daily, I pray that the Lord will hasten the time when I may behold them, with my own beloved Brother<s> and Sisters. Oh Mary Lizza dear Sister how is it with you, are you happy? I have so many questions to ask. but when can they ever be answered we hail a letter from home with such joy, and think it the greatest boon granted to mortals. The government in its infinite wisdom has seen fit to stop the Eastern Mail, so we are dependent on individuals for transportation of letters on West route.[vi]

But we think letters would come safe Via San Francisco. I intend to Mailing this that way. Do not be any way<s> frightened <alarmed> about us dear Sister for we are in the hands of the Lord and He hath said, he will fight the battles of his if his people are faithful He will fight their battles. There is no spirit of fear in man woman or child. Gen Harney sent one of his officers on here by the “Capt Vanfleet was his name” on here to see the state of things xxxxxxxx in Utah and how the Mormons felt about receiving a <new> Govornor inforced upon them by the point of the baronet [sic]. Capt Vanfleet attended our meeting last Sunday. Br John Taylor addressed the congregat<ion> I will enclose his sermon, not being able to do it justice in report<ing>. Our Gov [Brigham Young] then arose and said “Brethren we have been xxxxx <mobed> and driven time and time again and those that feel as I do would rather lay waste our beautiful City burn our houses destroy every vestage of vegitation take their Wives and children and flee to the Mountai<ns> Then again be brought to succumb to laws that will persicu<te> us in worshiping God by the dictates of our own consciences [p. 2] our lovely Constitution freely guarenteed that to every individu<al> and we will never deviate from the Constitution, but we will from those that are continually doing it so, There was then a vote taken to see who would uphold our Gov it was unamam<ous> they would all follow his example. he then beged if there were any who might feel to leave us, that they would now withdraw and if any wished so to do and need picuneary assistance he would help them[vii] as the time was drawing near when it would be very unsafe for imegration either to or from <this place> on account of the red men of the forest who are very much exasperated and swear vengance on all white men but Morm<ons> whom they as firmly swear to protect so you see we have str<ong> allies as these Mountains are filled with Warriors…Our Gov has held them in subjection a long time or there would have been far greater number of depredations on the white the emegrants. But when the Lord takes the reins it is time for man to cease control. There was a small company of Gold diggers come through here this summer it seems that for spite or fun they shot at every Indian they saw. the Indians very much incensed collected a large band of warriors to get itse[l]f ready for the next company which proved to be men women and children, attacked them put the after perssing [sic – pressing] the usual question “You Mormon” finding they were not put them all to death. thus it is the inosent has to suffer for the guilty and with <them>. But the band nearest us called the Utahs are very much improved a number of them have adopted our religion[viii] and do not kill the inocent for the guilty near as much though the feelings of revenge are so strong that the Indian nature will sometimes predominate. Why our dear Mary Lizza how often my thoughts wander back to scenes in childhood when we were one united happy family, and night and morn my prayers go up to the throne of Grace, for <the> time to be hastened when we may have <once more enjoy> that bliss on earth a united family

[Top of page 1, upside down:]
You need not think now that this letter is writen by Mother’s instegation No Mary Lizza She does not know I am writing. It is my own feelings I have tried to portray.

[Top of page 2, upside down:]
though <but,> do not think dearest Sister I reflect on any one. No Mary Lizza it was the Lord’s will that it should be so, and all we can do is to pray for to be reconciled. And daily my prayer is that you may all be brought to a knowledge of the truth in the due time all of the Lord[ix]

[end of manuscript]

Herein Charlotte reported two companies travelling through Salt Lake City that summer, the first being a group of “Gold diggers” who shot at every Indian they encountered. The second company was asked if they were Mormons and because they were not, the Indians attacked and put to death all the “men women and children.” As to the first group, in fact Brigham Young referred to them directly in his September 13 speech at the Bowery, which was then reported in the Deseret News that same day. Young said:

I have been told that the first company of packers that went through here this season, on their way from California to the States, shot at every Indian they saw between Carson Valley and Box elder, and what has been the result; Probably scores of persons have been killed, animals have been taken from nearly all the emigrants that have passed on that road”[x]

Young also had written a letter the day before to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, James W. Denver, giving a few more details on this first company:

I learn by report that many of the lives of the emigrants and considerable quantities of property has been taken. This is principally owing to a company of some three or four hundred returning Californians who travelled those roads last spring to the Eastern States, shooting at every indian they could see, a practisce utterly abhorrent to all good people, yet I regret to say one which has been indulged in to a great extent by travellers to and from the Eastern States and California, hence the Indians regard all white men alike their enimies and kill and plunder wherever they can do so with impunity and often the innocent suffer for the deeds of the guilty.[xi]

Thus Charlotte apparently quoted verbatim from the Deseret News her stepfather’s words regarding the actions of this large, eastbound company, while also incorporating a paraphrase from Young’s letter to Commissioner Denver about the suffering of the innocent.

Regarding the second company from Charlotte’s report, who were annihilated by vengeful Indians, two important questions must be answered. First, can Charlotte Cobb, in Salt Lake City, have known about the September 11 massacre of the Baker-Fancher party in southern Utah by Sunday, September 20? And secondly, could she have been referring to another company of “emegrants” who were all killed, men, women, and children? The answer to the first is “yes,” while the second is more complicated and demands a “possibly.”

It has been generally assumed that Brigham Young and others in Salt Lake City did not find out about the Baker-Fancher tragedy until John D. Lee arrived on September 29 to report their murders by “Indians.” Wilford Woodruff recorded in his journal that day, “Elder John D. Lee also arived from Harmony with an express and an awful tale of Blood.” He continued that Lee said “The Indians’killed all Their men about 60 in Number[.] They then rushed into their Carrall & Cut the throats of their women & Children except a some 8 or 10 Children which they brought & sold to the whites’”[xii] Nearly forty years later, Woodruff clarified that this was indeed the first that Brigham Young had heard of the news of the massacre. In a General Conference address Woodruff gave in 1894, in which he fully revoked the “Law of Adoption,” halting the practice of adoptive sealings in LDS temples, he implied that one reason for this momentous change in doctrine and practice, was because men like John D. Lee had “electioneer[ed] and labor[ed] with all their power to get men adopted to them,” and Lee in particular had asked “every man he could” to “be adopted to me, and I shall stand at the head of the kingdom, and you will be there with me.” Woodruff then reminded his audience that Lee “was a particular in that horrible scene–the Mountain Meadow massacre.” “Men have tried,” Woodruff continued, “to lay that to President Young. I was with President Young when the massacre was first reported to him. President Young was perfectly horrified at the recital of it, and wept over it.” Young also asked if any white people were involved, and was told that none were.[xiii] However none of these details are found in Woodruff’s contemporaneous journal account, and are highly specious. Young may have cried over Lee’s gruesome recital, but it was certainly not the “first report” of it he had received.

While Charlotte was correct in noting that the U. S. postal contracts with the Utah Territory had been canceled, the Mormons themselves had an extensive express postal system connecting the settlements along the Wasatch front in the north to the far-flung settlements in central and southern Utah. The John Hunt family ran the mail from Cedar City to Salt Lake City, and they certainly would have made at least one run to the territorial capitol sometime between September 11 and September 29, and thus could have easily borne news of the tragedy. Unfortunately no diarist in Salt Lake I have read noted their arrival during that time period, as they were all either down with constant illness (like Wilford Woodruff and Judge Elias Smith), or were preoccupied recording the details of the Mormon militia members who were out near the Sweetwater tracking the movements of and preparing for the arrival of Johnston’s army.[xiv]

Fortunately Indian scout and interpreter Dimick B. Huntington did relate in his journal that news of the massacre reached him in Salt Lake on Sunday, September 20. This is also the last possible date on which Charlotte could have penned the draft letter to her sister.

[September] 20 Arapene came to see Brigham Brigham told him now was the time to helpt himself to what he wanted [from non-Mormon emigrant trains] but he sayed he was [wants?] a squaw he sayed the Americans [i.e. non-Mormons] had not hurt him & he Did not want to hurt them but if they would only hurt one of his men then he would wake up he told me that the Piedes [Paiutes] had Killed the whole of a Emigrant Company & took all of their stock & it was right that was before the news had reached the City

Arapeen was the brother of Chief Walkara of the Timpanogo band of Utes, and his successor as chief upon Walkara’s death in 1855; and like his brother, he had also been baptized LDS.[xv] Charlotte’s mention that the Utes near Salt Lake had “greatly improved” and had been converted could have come to mind as a result of Arapeen’s visit that same day. From Huntington, we learn that Arapeen visited Brigham Young and received permission to attack any non-Mormon groups to steal their goods and livestock, although Arapeen was primarily interested in getting a wife. After meeting with Young, Arapeen then apparently told Huntington, who worked in the Young compound at South Temple and State Street, that the Piedes Cedar City band of Paiutes had killed an entire wagon train and stolen their stock “& it was right” or apparently somehow justified. (John D. Lee deflected culpability onto the Paiutes as well, claiming the Baker-Fancher party had poisoned springs that the Indians used, for example.) I am sure that Chief Arapeen had given the same news to Young, although Huntington did not mention it. Dimick Huntington however made the notation that this news reached him before it was generally known in the city on September 29, when Lee arrived with his fabrication of the events. This reveals that this entry was written a few days after the fact, but it remains a reliable and credible source, as the rest of Huntington’s journal for that period is consistently accurate. While we do not know for certain that Arapeen’s report of the massacre reached Charlotte on the same day, the fact that Dimick Huntington was employed in the Young compound, near Charlotte’s residence in the Lion House makes it quite possible.

To address the possibility that Charlotte Cobb was referring to some other wagon train’s tragic fate, we must look carefully at the scant information Cobb does give us. First is the timing–the murderous train of “Gold diggers” passed through Salt Lake in the summer of 1857, and the ill-fated train followed soon thereafter. We know that the Baker-Fancher parties left Salt Lake to head south to St. George on August 9, which fits perfectly well in the given time frame. Michael Landon, a brilliant historian employed at the LDS Church History Library whose knowledge of the overland companies is nearly exhaustive, generously provided me with a brief summation of the various other trains which both passed through Salt Lake (whether east- or westward bound, since the Cobb letter does not specify their direction) and were the victims of Indian predation that summer. Besides the Baker-Fancher company, Landon believes that the only other company that fits most if not all of the criteria is the Holloway company, led by Smith Holloway of Rockport, Missouri. Their company however was quite small, consisting of ten people on the morning of the attack. They had passed through Salt Lake in the early summer, thus far aligning with the Cobb report, and from there had taken the northern route across what is now Nevada. On the morning of August 14, 1857 they were ambushed by a band of about 30 ‘snake’ Indians on the banks of the Humboldt River, about 30 miles east of Winnemucca.[xvi] Six of the ten people were killed, including one woman and the Holloways’ infant daughter. In addition, 20 year-old Nancy Ann Bush Holloway, wife of Smith Holloway, was shot with numerous arrows and one bullet. Indians then prodded her to check if she was alive, but Mrs. Holloway pretended to be dead and did not even move or make a noise as they sliced her scalp from her head with an arrowhead. Her brother, Jerry Bush, was gravely wounded but survived, and two other men escaped without harm. Nancy Holloway’s scalp was found near her and was taken with her to California, where it was made into a wig. She died in Napa in 1862 at the age of 25, mentally deranged and “brooding” from her attack.[xvii]

Photo taken in California, showing Nancy wearing her scalp-wig

While Charlotte Cobb could have been referring to the Holloway company, their circumstances do not quite fit what Cobb described. Her account seems to imply a larger company than merely ten, and she reports that all were killed, when nearly half the Holloway party survived. Also Cobb claimed that those killed included “men women & children” but the Holloway migrants who died were four men, one woman, and one child. Lastly, we have Charlotte’s report that the Indians queried if the migrants were Mormons. Landon personally informed me that it would have been extremely unlikely that Bannock or Shoshone Indians near Winnemucca–in fact, any Indians along the northern route–would have been asking such a question. If Indians were in fact asking such a question of emigrant trains, they would surely have been those traveling along the southern route, through central and southern Utah, and then on to Las Vegas, which is the route that the Baker-Fancher party took. Charlotte’s account that Indians “put them all [i.e. men, women, and children] to death” seems to echo much more accurately Arapeen’s report of a band of Piedes killing “the whole of a Emigrant Company.” (Of course Arapeen– and Charlotte– were wrong, because the Baker-Fancher children aged seven and under were not killed.)

Given the scant but intriguing details of Charlotte Ives Cobb’s letter to her sister about a massacre of an emigrant train in the summer of 1857, I conclude that she was very likely referring to the Baker-Fancher massacre in southern Utah from September 7 to 11, 1857, perpetrated by zealous Mormon militia men and a few local Indians. Although the extremely compact timing is problematic, I think the evidence shows that Charlotte could have heard about the massacre, if not by the regular north-bound mails, at least by Chief Arapeen’s report of it to Dimick Huntington on Sunday, September 20–the last possible date which she could have penned the letter draft in question. If Cobb did refer to the Mountain Meadows massacre, then it is certainly the earliest written account of it found to date, predating Huntington’s retroactive journal entry by several days, and Wilford Woodruff’s journal entry by nine days.

ENDNOTES

[i] The letter is clearly a draft. It is undated, unsigned, and unfinished; and Charlotte practiced writing the capitol letter “N” many times at the top of the sheet of paper.

[ii] Charlotte Ives Cobb herself led quite a fascinating life. Her first marriage was as a plural wife of William S. Godbe, and she reportedly was a spiritualist medium for the Godbeite movement. She was also a radical feminist and politicked relentlessly for years in favor of women’s equal rights, but was too radical for the more centrist Emmeline B. Wells, and was therefore virtually banned from the pages of Wells’s Woman’s Exponent. Still, LDS President John Taylor appointed Charlotte Cobb Godbe to present Utah’s petition for women’s franchise to the US Congress, the first of its kind. After divorcing the excommunicated Godbe, she married John Adams Kirby, her first cousin once removed, who was a wealthy mine owner and 20 years her junior. Although she never bore children, she and her second husband adopted a male relative to raise. She died in her home in the Avenues of Salt Lake City in 1908. See for example Beverly Beeton, “’I Am an American Woman:’ Charlotte Ives Godbe Kirby,” Journal of the West, April 1988, vol. 27, no. 2, 13-19.

[iii] “Complimentary Dinner,” Deseret News, September 9, 1851, 5.

[iv] “Further Remarks by President Brigham Young,” Deseret News, September 16, 1857, p. 5.

[v] Mary Elizabeth Cobb had married the prominent New York trader Charles Day Kellogg in 1850 and by September 1857 had borne three “cherubs”: Grace Kellogg, born about 1854; Lucy Candler Kellogg, born September 26, 1855; and Mary Elizabeth Kellogg, born July 15, 1857. A son named Henry Burr Kellogg, born in 1853, died a month after his birth.

[vi] The U. S. government canceled all contracts with Mormon postal carriers (like Porter Rockwell and Abraham O. Smoot) in July 1857 as Johnston’s Army began their march to Utah.

[vii] Another contemporary account reports that Young said that Sunday morning:

If it were any use, I would ask whether there is one person in this congregation who wants to go to the United States; but I know I should not find any. But I will pledge myself that if there is a man, woman, or child that wants to go back to the States, if they will pay their debts, and not steal anything, they can go; and if they are poor and honest, we will help them to go. That has been my well-known position all the time. (Brigham Young, “The United States’ Administration and Utah Army,” Journal of Discourses, September 13, 1857, vol. 5, p. 230.)

While Charlotte reported that Young generously said he would financially assist those wishing to leave the territory, this report indicates Young would only allow to leave those who had paid off their debts first.

[viii] For example, 120 Utes were baptized LDS on July 27, 1854 in Manti, Utah. See Lillian H. Armstrong Fox, ‘sanpete’s First Public Institution: The Manti Council House, 1851-1911,” Saga of the Sanpitch (Manti, Utah: Messenger-Enterprise press) vol. 27, 1995, 34.

[ix] Charlotte Ives Cobb to Mary Elizabeth Cobb Kellogg, undated draft [September 19 or 20, 1857?], Theodore Schroeder Collection on Mormonism, Theodore Albert Shroeder Papers (microfilm edition, 1986), Wisconsin Historical Society, Box 2, Folder 3, Reel 2, images 663 and 664.

[x] “Remarks by Pres. Brigham Young, Bowery, Sunday Afternoon, Sep. 13, 1857,” (J. V. Long, reporter) Deseret News, September 23, 1857, pp. 228-229.

[xi] Brigham Young to James W. Denver, September 12, 1857, Second District Court, Criminal Case Files, Series 24291, Box 2, Utah State Archives. I am grateful for Michael Landon pointing out this letter to me.

[xii] Wilford Woodruff Journals, September 29, 1857, MS 1352, Box 3, Folder 1, LDS Church History Library.

[xiii] “Law of Adoption,” Wilford Woodruff (Arthur Winter, reporter), April 8, 1894 ? Deseret Evening News, April 14, 1894, 9.

[xiv] Elias Smith noted in his journal that John Hunt delivered the southern mail on September 1 and then again on September 30. There surely would have been one if not several more postal runs during that busy and important month.

[xv] James Linforth (ed.), Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley, Illustrated, etc. (Liverpool & London: Franklin D. Richards, 1855) 105.

[xvi] Snake Indians were the Bannocks and Shoshones who lived in the Snake River valley of southern Idaho and eastern Oregon.

[xvii] William Audley Maxwell, Crossing the Plains, Days of ‘57 (San Francisco: Sunset Publishing House, 1915) 62-75; and William C. Killums, “Letter from California,” September 27, 1857, printed in the Springfield Mirror (Springfield, Missouri), November 21, 1857. Killums was one of the Holloway survivors who escaped unharmed, although he witnessed his wife shot to death in the neck. His first-hand account, written less than two months after it occurred, is a chilling and emotionally jarring narrative.

Scholarly Inquiry: Jared Farmer

We recently invited Jared Farmer, associate professor of history at Stony Brook University and author of On Zion’s Mount, to answer some questions about his latest project, Mormons in the Media, 1830-2012.

What was the genesis of this (e-book) project? Did it start as a casual interest that only later became a serious project? Was it an outgrowth of teaching?

All of the above. The past couple of years I spent a lot of time creating a personal archive of historic images for use in my lecture courses. In the process I got quite good at finding images online–using familiar search engines (e.g., Google Images, Flickr), as well as some obscure sites, and many educational databases that are inaccessible to non-academics because of paywalls. This past spring, once Romney cinched the GOP nomination, I decided it would be worthwhile–and fun–to put my image-finding skills to public use. What began as a diversion from my book manuscript (Trees in Paradise: A California History, due out next year) became a minor obsession; what was supposed to be a little online illustrated essay on portrayals of Mormon facial hair became Mormons in the Media. I ended up spending far more time than I budgeted, and I used up my professorial tithing on eBay buying LDS ephemera.

What led you to publish electronically rather than in a more traditional format?

Three reasons: 1) I wanted to get it out in time for the election season; and e-publishing, whatever else you may think of it, has a fast turnaround. 2) I wanted to reach a non-academic audience, including journalists. 3) It would be a violation of copyright law to commercially publish most of the twentieth-century material, and it would be a nightmare to track down permissions for print publication (and prohibitively expensive to pay use fees).

In the preface, you indicate that you will consider outsider-generated images of Mormons, as well as images promoted by Latter-day Saints themselves. To what extent were these coherent categories?

Today, Mormons are much more in control of their image than a century ago. There were, of course, Mormon painters, illustrators, and photographers in the pioneer period, but most of their work was created for home consumption, and there were precious few Latter-day Saints in positions of media power outside of Utah. For heuristic purposes, I would propose this rough periodization of Mormon image-making in the U.S. public sphere: 1) From Joseph Smith, Jr., to Joseph F. Smith, when outsiders largely defined the (overwhelmingly negative) visual image of Mormons. 2) From Joseph F. Smith to David O. McKay, when the LDS Church reacted defensively to continued anti-Mormon visual stereotypes, including cinematic images, and set up a rudimentary PR program. 3) From President McKay and the television until President Hinckley and the Internet, when the brethren in Salt Lake presided over a permanent, professionalized, proactive PR program. 4) The current era, dominated by the Web, in which images generated by Mormons, ex-Mormons, non-Mormons, and anti-Mormons swirl together, often making reference to one another; and in which lay members at their internet-connected devices do as much work as the expanded corps of media relations officers in the Church Office Building to shape the image of Mormons and Mormonism (sometimes at the invitation of the brethren, sometimes to their chagrin).

Who do you envision using this collection (the media? teachers? students? scholars?) and how?

I’m hoping that during the election season, my e-book will find its way into the hand” slaps” of many journalists assigned to the Romney beat and/or the religion beat. Although there are many new and noteworthy LDS-themed books out there–Joanna Brooks, Matthew Bowman, Spencer Fluhman, and John Turner being the most prominent authors–I think my work fills a niche: it’s illustrated, it’s in color, and it’s free.

At some point after the election, I plan to take down the website, and work on a final, revised version of Mormons in the Media that includes events up to Election Day. I also want to obtain higher-resolution scans of some of the older material. Next year I plan to create a personal website where I will permanently host the revised e-book.

Speaking of revisions: I rushed this out in time for the GOP convention. When I go back for a new round of editing, I anticipate that I will find more than a few errors and typos. If any of your readers spot mistakes, they should let me know. I also welcome ideas for additions.

After this “Mormon Moment” ends (I can sense the impending fatigue), my e-book will primarily be useful as a resource for undergraduate courses on U.S. western history and U.S. religious history. I would be delighted if professors devised primary source assignments around the collection, or simply projected some of the images in their lecture halls.

Also, perhaps a few graduate students and independent scholars will find seeds of research projects in this collection;or  “image dump,” if you want to be critical. For this audience–including readers of the Juvenile Instructor–I wanted to provide a fresh (if admittedly rough) update to the classic (but now dated and out-of-date) The Mormon Graphic Image, 1834-1914 by Bunker and Bitton.

It’s a bit puzzling, given the current prominence of media studies and mass communication studies in academia, that scholars haven’t done more with LDS visual and material cultures as manifestations of American pop culture. For Mormon cultural apologetics, you can consult Terryl Givens’s excellent People of Paradox, but that’s not exactly what I’m looking for. I’m unmoved by the perennial question, “Where are the great Mormon artists?” (I think the answer remains “nowhere”–though I have a soft spot for Minerva Teichert). More fertile questions might include: Thinking historically and sociologically, what is the function of the “Mormon middlebrow”–the aesthetic behind almost all LDS art, architecture, and visual culture? What explains its endurance? What is the historical relationship between Joseph Smith’s fantastic religious imagination and the uninspired realism of twentieth-century visual imaginings of the pre-life, the afterlife, and the Book of Mormon? Why does the interior decoration of contemporary Mormon temples so closely resemble the faux-aristocratic styling on display in the steroidal mansions of the nouveau riche? How would one write the history of Mormon fashion?including outerwear, garments, and hair? What is the relationship of Latter-day Saints, past and present, to images of religious violence? How do anti-Mormon visual portrayals of temple violence relate to the much older anti-Semitic iconographic tradition of blood libel? And so on.

Your readers probably don’t need this advice, but I’ll give it anyway: For umpteen images of seldom-seen Mormoniana with expert historical commentary, you must follow Ardis Parshall at Keepapitchinin. Her blog is a box of treasures.

Do you see yourself, in part, as a “Mormon historian,” given that you wrote your first two books on Utah/Mormon-related topics and have now issued this e-book on Mormons in the media? Do you have future plans to write on Mormons/Mormonism?

Actually, I’ve never considered myself a Mormon historian. I wear two main hats: environmental historian and historian of the American West. As a subset of the latter, I proudly think of myself as a historian of Utah (and will be contributing the first chapter to a forthcoming textbook on that subject). My discomfort with the label “Mormon historian” is not primarily political. It’s more about being aware of my limitations as a scholar. I have expertise in the peoples and landscapes of Utah, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau. But when it comes to the history of Mormonism, there is such a high standard of scholarship! When I compare myself to the leading researchers in the field, past and present, I can really only claim to be an expert on Mormonism of the 1850s, and perhaps Mormon-Indian relations across the nineteenth century. My command of Church history is competent but hardly extraordinary.

Because I am an insider-outsider (in contradistinction to Jan Shipps, an outsider-insider), I enjoy a sideways view of Mormonism. Because I know enough–but not too much–about LDS history, I probably see certain things and make certain connections more easily than most insiders and outsiders. I enjoy being an interloper.

In addition to my two main fields (environmental, western), I aspire to be a cultural critic with a broad purview, including religion. For example, I recently wrote an essay on yoga for Reviews in American History. Earlier I wrote a review of The Book of Mormon (the musical) for Religion Dispatches. Mormons in the Media falls in this category of cultural criticism.

After the upcoming revision of my e-book, I don’t anticipate doing another Mormon (or even western) project in the foreseeable future. My next couple of book projects will take me toward the global history of science and technology. But who knows: maybe someday, in my “senior years” as a scholar, I’ll come back home, as they say.