This Abominable Slavery

Brigham Young speaks on slavery and for the first time publicly articulates a racial priesthood restriction, January 23, 1852

Document Introduction

Brigham Young’s speech on January 23 is the first documented instance of a prophet-president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publicly articulating a racial priesthood restriction.[1] From the context of the debate that ensued on January 27, however, it is clear that the racial restriction was not a new idea to legislators. Orson Spencer, for example, speaks as though the restriction was an understood reality and not a new idea that he was hearing for the first time.

Other evidence from the period bears this out. Government explorer John W. Gunnison, for example, wrote of the racial restriction in his book The Mormons which was published for a national audience in 1852.[2] The timeline of Gunnison’s publication and the information contained in his book make it evident that he did not learn of the racial restriction from Young’s speeches to the legislature, but came to his understanding through his friendship with Latter-day Saint Albert Carrington who served as an assistant for one of Gunnison’s expeditions as well as a consultant for his book. Gunnison had spent the winter of 1849-1850 in Salt Lake City as a member of the Howard Stansbury surveying expedition and his friendship with Carrington grew out of that experience. Carrington is the most probable source of Gunnison’s understanding of Latter-day Saint teachings on a variety of topics, including the racial priesthood restriction.[3]

In The Mormons Gunnison explained that the “Negro is cursed as to the priesthood” according to Latter-day Saint teachings “and must always be a servant wherever his lot is cast.” He also indicated that a system of black “involuntary labor” operated in Utah but that it took place in the absence of “any law on the subject,” an indication that Gunnison wrote his assessment before the legislature passed An Act in Relation to Service. Gunnison further reported that “Nego caste springs naturally from their doctrine of blacks being ineligible to the priesthood.”[4]

Gunnison would have arrived at his understanding of Latter-day Saint racial beliefs sometime between 1849 and 1852, not as a result of Young’s unpublished speeches to the legislature. Young’s January 23 speech is nonetheless the first known public articulation of the priesthood restriction from a Latter-day Saint church president.[5] Young spoke again to the legislature on February 5 and more forcefully laid out a rationale for the restriction.

Even if the restriction was in place before Young articulated it to the legislature, historians have found no evidence of church publications discussing it before 1852, a fact that quickly changed. Following the legislative session, the church owned Deseret News printed its own discussion of the racial restriction and other church publications followed suit. At least five articles in Latter-day Saint newspapers mentioned the racial restriction over the next five years.[6] Certainly 1852 was a crucial turning point in the Church’s open acknowledgement of its racial ban.

What follows is George D. Watt’s Pitman shorthand version of Young’s speech on January 23. We have rendered it more readable with our insertions in brackets. Then we offer a comparison in parallel columns of Watt’s shorthand version of the same speech juxtaposed against Watt’s own longhand transcription of the speech. The text in the left column is a new, complete transcript of Watt's shorthand record without any of our editorial insertions, while the text in the right column is Watt’s longhand transcription of his own shorthand. Note the significant amount of text in Watt’s longhand transcription which has no basis in the shorthand. Sometimes Watt simply added text that was not in the shorthand or omitted text from the shorthand as he transcribed it into longhand. A part of the process involved Watt making the incomplete nature of his shorthand readable, but the method also involved insertions and deletions. (Shorthand reporters of the day commonly made changes like these as they transcribed; their ideas of accuracy were very different from ours). Note also the many differences between the two columns where the content is similar but Watt changed a question in the shorthand into a statement in the longhand or he added a negative, changed the subjects and objects of verbs, or changed Young’s personal declarations from “I” to “we” in a way that made the speech sound as if he were speaking for all Mormons instead of only for himself, and other such alterations.

[1] Brigham Young, before Territorial Legislature, January 23, 1852, CR 100 912, Church History Department Pitman Shorthand transcriptions, 2013-2021, Addresses and sermons, 1851-1874, Miscellaneous transcriptions, 1869, 1872, 1889, 1848, 1851-1854, 1859-1863, Utah Territorial Legislature, 1852 January-February, CHL.

[2] John W. Gunnison, The Mormons, or, Latter-day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1852).

[3] For evidence of Gunnison’s publication timeline and friendship with Carrington, see Brigham D. Madsen, “John W. Gunnison’s Letters to His Mormon Friend, Albert Carrington,” Utah Historical Quarterly 59 (Summer 1991): 264-267; and W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 147.

[4] John W. Gunnison, The Mormons, or, Latter-day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1852), 51, 143.

[5] Young spoke of the restriction in a private meeting with church leaders on February 13, 1849. See Church Historian’s Office, General Church Minutes, February 13, 1849, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[6] “To the Saints,” Deseret News, 3 April 1852, 2; Orson Pratt, “The Pre-Existence of Man,” The Seer (Washington, DC) April 1853, 56; “Southern Women and Slavery,” St. Louis Luminary, (St. Louis, Missouri) 24 March 1855, 70; “African Discoveries,” Western Standard, (San Francisco, California) 7 February 1857, 2; “Remarks on J. R. Giddings’s Letter,” The Mormon (New York), September 12, 1857, 2; (excerpts from each of these publications are included in chapter 8 below) see also, Newell G. Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People within Mormonism, 2^nd edition (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2018), 116-117.