This Abominable Slavery
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On July 22, 1847, a group of about forty refugees entered the Salt Lake Valley. Among them were three enslaved men, two of whom shared the religion, Mormonism, that had caused them to flee. The valley was also home to members of the Ute tribe, who would sometimes barter captive women and children to Spanish colonizers. Thus, the question of whether the Latter-day Saints would accept or reject slavery in their new Zion confronted them on the day they first arrived. Five years later, after Utah had become an American territory, its legislature was prodded to take up the question then roiling the nation: would they be slave or free?
George D. Watt, the official reporter for the 1852 legislative session, reported debates and speeches in Pitman shorthand. They remained in their original format, virtually untouched, for more than one hundred and fifty years, until LaJean Purcell Carruth transcribed them. In this eye-opening volume, Carruth, Christopher Rich, and W. Paul Reeve draw extensively on these new sources to chronicle the session, during which the legislature passed two important statutes: one that legally transformed African American slaves into "servants" but did not pass the condition of servitude on to their children and another that authorized twenty-year indentures for enslaved Native Americans.
This Abominable Slavery places these debates within the context of the nation's growing sectional divide and contextualizes the meaning of these laws in the lives of Black enslaved people and Native American indentured servants. In doing so, it sheds new light on race, religion, slavery, and unfree labor in the antebellum period.
W. Paul Reeve is the chair of the History Department and Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah. He is author of Let's Talk About Race and Priesthood (Deseret Book, 2023) and Project Manager and General Editor of an award-winning digital database, Century of Black Mormons, designed to name and identify all known Black Latter-day Saints baptized into the faith between 1830 and 1930. The database is live at www.CenturyofBlackMormons.org
Christopher B. Rich, Jr. is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. He holds a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law and an LL.M. from the Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School. He served for 11 years in the U.S. Army JAG Corps before transitioning to the Reserves. He has published award-winning articles in the fields of National Security Law and 19th century Latter-day Saint history.
LaJean Purcell Carruth is a senior historian at the Church History Department in Salt Lake City. She is a
professional transcriber of 19th and early 20th century documents written in Pitman shorthand, Taylor shorthand, and in the Deseret Alphabet. Through her work, hundreds of previously illegible shorthand documents are now available for research. Her research specialties include Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, 19th century Mormon history, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and race and priesthood in 19th century Utah.