a more powerful effect upon the body : early mormonism s

“A More Powerful Effect upon the Body”: EarlyMormonism’s Theory of Racial Redemption and

American Religious Theories of Race

JOSEPH R. STUART

This paper examines Joseph Smith’s construction of a racialized theology, which drew uponconceptions of Abrahamic lineage and the possibility of “racial redemption” for peoples ofAfrican descent through conversion to Mormonism. This ran against the grain of hisProtestant and Catholic contemporaries’ religious understandings of race. He expandedupon earlier iterations of his ideas with the introduction of new rituals and liturgy relatedto LDS temples. Smith’s wife may have invited a person of African descent to participatein this new liturgy before his murder in June 1844. The views he expressed about peoplesof African descent before his death are inchoate, although high-ranking Mormons relatedto Smith seemed to have agreed with the possibility of racial redemption. After Smith’sdeath, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders framed the LDS temple and priesthoodrestriction in terms of Smith’s liturgy rather than any of Smith’s varied teachings on race.This paper also argues that Mormonism’s racial restriction arose from its roots in thesealing ritual rather than ecclesiological power structures. Mormonism’s racial doctrinehas often been described as a “priesthood ban,” referring to ecclesiastical authority.However, this discounts the religious contexts in which it arose and excludes theexperiences of women and children, who were not allowed to participate in theendowment or sealing ordinances. This paper places Mormonism’s temple liturgy atthe front and center of the LDS Church’s priesthood and temple restriction.

SIX months after his January 1839 escape from incarceration in Liberty,Missouri, Joseph Smith preached to a group of Latter-day Saints “onthe doctrine of election.” Willard Richards, a portly thirty-five-year-old

physician, took copious notes of Smith’s sermon, in which the Mormonprophet expounded his views on the nature and mission of the Holy Ghost.Smith declared that two “comforters” existed. The first was the same givenat Pentecost that expanded the intellect and enlightened any “man who is ofthe literal seed of Abraham.” Those with Abrahamic lineage would physically

The author is grateful for the comments and suggestions of Audrey Bastian, Matthew Bowman,Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Paul Reeve, Saskia Tielens, the Mormon StudiesPublication Workshop, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers in the creation of the manuscript.

Joseph R. Stuart is a PhD Candidate in American History at the University of Utah andDirector of the Rocky Mountain Religion Seminar.

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Church History 87:3 (September 2018), 768–796.© American Society of Church History, 2018doi:10.1017/S0009640718001580

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feel the Holy Spirit wash over their souls at conversion. For those not born withIsraelite blood (“Gentiles”), the Holy Ghost functioned as a racial cleansingagent, which would purge “out the old blood and make him actually the seed ofAbraham.” Smith persevered in this vein, declaring that those without “theblood of Abraham (naturally) must have a new creation by the Holy Ghost”through baptism. For those born outside the Abrahamic covenant and thebloodline of Israel who converted to Mormonism, there would “be more of apowerful effect upon the body” and an effect “visible to the eye.”1

Smith’s sermon underscores a crucial aspect of Mormon racial theology.Early Mormonism viewed the Christian notion of adoption, wherein a personbecame a “son” or “daughter” of God through conversion (signified bybaptism in Mormonism), as an event that required an accompanying literalacquisition of Israelite blood. Due to widely circulated theories in the UnitedStates that attributed “either Israelite ancestry, Aryan ancestry, or both, tocertain so-called Nordic peoples,” early Mormons associated white skin withthe blessings of the Abrahamic covenant. Specifically, Latter-day Saintsbelieved that, as heirs of Abraham’s covenant with God, their posteritywould be greater than the number of stars in the sky.2

Through the lens of Joseph Smith’s racial teachings, which stipulated that aperson’s race could change and that a person could be made an heir ofAbraham, this paper examines the relationship between race and religion inthe antebellum United States, particularly as the two intersected in discoursesurrounding peoples of African descent.There is a rich historiography surrounding Mormonism’s priesthood and

temple restriction, which did not allow men of African descent to holdecclesiastical office or any people of African descent to participate in Mormontemple liturgy. Many works in the literature primarily trace Smith’s statementson race, showing that peoples of African descent were once permitted to holdpriesthood office but without revealing how Mormonism differed from otherreligious groups at the time.3 Furthermore, these studies downplay the

1“History, 1838–1856, volume C–1 (2 November 1838–31 July 1842),” The Joseph SmithPapers, accessed June 10, 2017, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-c-1-2-november-1838-31-july-1842/543. The second Comforter was a visitation ofJesus Christ.

2Armand Mauss, “In Search of Ephraim: Traditional Mormon Conceptions of Lineage andRace,” Journal of Mormon History 25, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 156.

3See Connell O’Donovan, “The Mormon Priesthood Ban and Elder Q. Walker Lewis: AnExample for his More Whiter Brethren to Follow,” The John Whitmer Historical AssociationJournal 26 (2006): 47–99; Armand Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing MormonConceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Newell G.Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves and Blacks (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1981); Lester E. Bush andArmand L. Mauss, eds., Neither White nor Black (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1984); Lester E.Bush, “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” Dialogue: A Journal ofMormon Thought 8 (Spring 1973): 11–68; and Russell W. Stevenson, “‘A Negro Preacher’: The

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exclusion of African-descendedmen, women, and children fromMormon templeliturgy. Women’s histories have been notably absent. Many have incorrectlycalled this racial restriction the LDS “priesthood ban” rather than the “LDSpriesthood and temple ban.” This second term, which I use throughout thisessay, numbers not only men but women and children among those excludedby the racial restriction. This article seeks to piece together the ways in whichJoseph Smith, and later Brigham Young, justified racial inclusion or exclusionwith reference to broader American religious thought. I argue that JosephSmith’s radical racial teachings did not carry through to the second generationof his nascent religious movement. This was not only a result of the Mormonprophet’s inchoate teachings on race but was due to changes in what defined“priesthood” in early Mormonism. Priesthood came to mean more thanecclesiastical authority, although the term was still used in that way. Inaddition to ecclesiastical priesthood, Smith introduced a liturgy that formedeternal kinship networks (what I call the “temple priesthood”) that connectedmen and women to one another and to God. Smith’s wife, Emma, may haveinvited a woman of African descent named Jane Elizabeth Manning James4 tobecome a part of the Smith family’s eternal kinship network in 1842, althoughdetails surrounding the invitation are unclear. Smith’s racial theory offeredpeoples of African descent inclusion in the Abrahamic covenant and access totemple priesthood upon conversion to Mormonism. Joseph Smith’s successor,Brigham Young, and other Mormon leaders aligned Mormonism’s racialbeliefs with those of contemporary Protestants, which removed the means bywhich Africans could become heirs of Abraham in LDS belief and practice.This excluded peoples of African descent from the eternal kinship networksthat Smith introduced before his death—practices and liturgy that eventuallybecame equated with Mormon polygamy.

I. TWO RACES, WHITE AND BLACK

Joseph Smith’s theology of race redemption appeared first in the Book ofMormon (1829). The book’s first prophet, named Lehi, is an Israelite

Worlds of Elijah Ables,” Journal of Mormon History 58, no. 2 (2013): 165–254. Paul Reeve’s workconnects Mormonism’s racial beliefs and racialization by white Americans but is more attuned toarguments surrounding race and whiteness rather than religious belief. See W. Paul Reeve, Religionof a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2015). In addition, Max Perry Mueller’s work promises to start new conversations onMormonism and race. See Max Perry Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

4Born Jane Elizabeth Manning, she did not meet her husband, Isaac James, until after JosephSmith’s death. I follow the convention of referring to her by her marital name even whenspeaking of her earlier life.

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through his ancestor Manasseh.5 After Lehi’s death, the eldest son, Laman, andhis wicked followers separate from his younger, righteous brother, Nephi, andabandon their father’s religion. The Lamanites’ separation from Nephi’s familysymbolized their separation from God.The term “skins of blackness” in Smith’s scripture has been equated by some

with the metaphor of spiritual degeneracy.6 However, the Book of Mormonmakes a very strong correlation between righteousness (light skin) andwickedness (dark skin). The Lamanites’ skin literally became dark (becauseof the wickedness of the Lamanites) and they were spiritually “dark”(because of their personal choices). The racial effects of wickedness werefirst realized spiritually before becoming visible through skin color.7 Thefluidity of skin color in the Book of Mormon is similar to the Bible’s use ofleprosy. In the Old Testament, God cursed people with this seeminglyirrevocable and debilitating disease to signal disfavor to both the cursed aswell as favor to their righteous peers. Like leprosy in the Bible, Smithdescribed skin color as an entity subject to change based on God’s blessingor curse. The Book of Mormon employs race both as figurative and literalmanifestations of impurity that only God can heal. Wicked Laman’sgeographic separation from righteous Nephi is more than a separation fromfamily—although that is an important detail. It is a separation from God andthe blessings of the Abrahamic covenant. The Book of Mormon narratorrecords that the Lamanites accepted the Nephites’ religion; upon returning tothe Abrahamic covenant, “their skin became white like unto the Nephites.”8

Smith viewed dark skin as a sign of the curse demarcating a separation fromthe Abrahamic covenant. The turning away from God was a racial issue asmuch as it was a religious one. Smith never referred to African-descendedpeoples when he discussed those with “skins of blackness.” Smith’s religio-racial logic did not deny persons of any lineage or legal status but allowedfor the possibility of the redemption of all peoples from both sin and darkskin. Both African Americans and Native Americans could gain theblessings of Abraham, including ecclesiastical priesthood office, byconversion. This quest to offer “both Jew and Gentile” the blessings of

5Alma 10:3.6For studies of the symbolic nature of “blackness,” see John A. Tvedtnes, “The Charge of

‘Racism’ in the Book of Mormon,” Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies[FARMS] Review 15, no. 2 (2003): 183–197; Douglas Campbell, “‘White’ or ‘Pure’: FiveVignettes,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 119–135; BrantA. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon,vol. 4 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford, 2007), 696–697; and Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert andThe World of the Jaredites (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1952), 84–85.

7Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 34.83 Nephi 2:15.




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Abraham and the promise of equal footing with whites went beyond what mostother Protestants preached at the time.9

The Mormon prophet combined a belief in the exclusivist British Israelitismwith his own unique strain of Christian universalism to account for the vexingquestion of varying skin color in the human family.10 By virtue of havingthe blood of ancient Israel flowing through their veins, early Mormons andother nineteenth-century people believed that righteous whites (Israelites)possessed physical and spiritual traits attributable to their Abrahamic lineage.Moreover, this bondage extended to peoples traditionally placed outside ofthe Abrahamic family, especially individuals of African descent. In an effortto offer the blessings of Abraham to all peoples, Smith configured race as a“spiritual rather than physical bondage.”11 This innovation provided a pathfor Africans to become heirs to God’s promises to Abraham. In the NewTestament, John the Baptist preached to the Pharisees and Sadducees thattheir Abrahamic lineage did not elevate their relationship or access to God.Indeed, John the Baptist informed the Jews, “God is able of these stones toraise up children unto Abraham.”12 Joseph Smith similarly believed thatAbrahamic lineage did not matter in relation to salvation or divine favor.God could raise up anyone, including Africans, as heirs or “children ofAbraham.”

Historian Peter Silver has observed that many white people in the lateeighteenth-century Atlantic world believed one’s “own actions andenvironments could alter them even at the deepest levels—which was oneway of saying that no levels of difference lay especially deep.”13 As a result,white Christians did not generally withhold the possibility of salvation frompeoples of African descent, and they considered peoples of African descentto be humans, although not equal to whites. Some slaveholders encouragedthe religious instruction of their chattel property under close whitesupervision.14 Although salvation was possible, the redemption of Africansouls through Christianity did not allow converts to gain the visible privilege

92 Nephi 26:33.10For an overview of British Israelitism in the Mormon context, see Mauss, All Abraham’s

Children, 17–40.11Ryan Stuart Bingham, “Curses and Marks: Racial Dispensations and Dispensations of race in

Joseph Smith’s Bible Revision and the Book of Abraham,” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 3(July 2015): 57. Bingham argues that Smith drew upon the racial milieu in which he lived butemphasized a belief in prevenient grace to make racial redemption a possibility in the scripturaltexts that he produced.

12Matthew 3:9 (King James Version).13Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York:

W. W. Norton, 2009), 114; and see also 106–124.14Black evangelists were required to work under the close supervision of whites. See Charles F.

Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial andAntebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 46–50. Some

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of whiteness—white skin.15 Joseph Smith simultaneously viewed peoples ofcolor as sinful and inferior while also allowing room for them to receiveracial and soteriological redemption.Joseph Smith did not exclude those he believed were born outside of the

bloodlines of Israel, such as peoples of African descent, from becoming heirsto the promised blessings of Abraham.16 They could be adopted into Israel,assume priesthood office, and eventually receive what early Mormons believedwas the Abrahamic covenant’s distinguishing physical characteristic—whiteskin.17 The racial theology of early Mormonism provided an explanation forthe social problem of racial difference and promised that such distinctionswould be swallowed up when converts became new creatures in Christ throughbaptism. When people of African descent converted to Mormonism andbecame heirs to Abraham, their racial curses would be lifted and they wouldbecome white. As sociologist Armand Mauss has explained, “Although the[Mormon] gospel and the Abrahamic covenant are ultimately for everyone,”Israelites enjoyed a privileged status by already having a claim to Abraham’sblessings. Their return would be a smoother transition than those born outsideof the Abrahamic covenant.18 Smith viewed the birthright blessings associatedwith the Abrahamic covenant as tied to Israelite blood—thus the need for newblood and the physical transformation of converts.This theological innovation went beyond any other religious theories of race

during Smith’s lifetime by providing a means for Africans to become heirs tothe Abrahamic covenant. Most Christians who believed peoples of Africandescent could become heirs of salvation omitted any sort of racialpurification from their doctrinal tenets. They did not see any purpose for

slaveholders also actively discouraged the evangelization of slaves, especially after Nat Turner’srevolt.

15White privilege has often been referred to as a “visible” privilege. Because whiteness can beseen, others recognize the individual’s color and reinforce the privilege. Whiteness, as the norm,is also a form of “invisible privilege,” because white is assumed to be the standard to which allelse is compared. See Steve Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2007),39–47.

16Blackness and the Curse of Ham/Cain were often associated with Africans. See David M.Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 41–78; and Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse:The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–23(especially 4–8), 26, 71–76, 80, 98, 106, 172, 181.

17Joseph Smith taught that God denied “none that come unto him, black and white, bond andfree, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jewand Gentile,” and he believed that Abrahamic lineage could be subsumed in the personal choiceto convert to Mormonism. 2 Nephi 26:33.

18“Believing blood” was coined by Mormons in the 1850s but clearly conveys what Josephbelieved in the 1830s. See Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 22–23.




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redeeming a fleeting, temporal characteristic such as race.19 Early Americanswould have viewed persons as “ill-informed or doctrinaire to use skin coloras an index of something essential.”20 Likewise, those that aimed for theracial uplifting of peoples of African descent omitted any sort of religiousmechanisms for racial change from their practices and beliefs.21 AmericanProtestants and Catholics generally viewed salvation and racial uplift asseparate issues in the quest to improve the lot of Africans, both in heavenand on earth.

The Mormon prophet’s belief in racial redemption did not align with hisAmerican contemporaries. Most Americans believed that skin color resultedfrom mitigating factors, such as class or living environment, and wasmalleable in relation to those factors. Jacksonian definitions of race matchedwhat today is called “ethnicity,” reflecting a person’s lineage rather than skincolor. There is some evidence that eighteenth-century Moravians believedthat conversion to Christianity could lead to a change in skin color overmultiple generations.22 However, most white Americans believed thatAfricans (born as “hereditary heathens”) could become as civilized as whitesor see their dark skin become white.23

II. THE CURSE OF CAIN AND THE SOUL OF MAN

Two events caused Joseph Smith to expound upon his peculiar doctrine ofracial redemption as his religion moved to Ohio during the winter of 1830 to1831. First, Mormonism embraced its first convert of African descent. OneOhio newspaper described the proselyte “Black Pete” as a “revelator . . .sometimes seized with strange vagaries and odd conceits.” A Philadelphia-based newspaper informed its readers, “The Mormonites have among them

19See Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World,1600–2000 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2006), 121–167; Rebecca Anne Goetz,The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2012); Richard A. Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity,169–210. Christine Heyrman has also shown that white Southern evangelicals erected barriers toprevent interracial worship—they were not interested in making blacks equal, even in worship,with whites. See Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 67–69.

20Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 118.21See Heyrman, Southern Cross, 206–252.22See Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 197–199.23Rebecca Goetz uses the phrase “hereditary heathens” to describe seventeenth-century

Protestant views of religio-racial curses, but the ideas remained popular in American history. SeeGoetz, Baptism of Early Virginia, 1–12, 112–137.

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an African,” adding the convert’s sensational belief that he could fly.24

Although Black Pete soon left the Mormonites, his presence caused Smith tograpple with the racial differences in his burgeoning church. The Mormonprophet’s own intellectual wrestling with the theological ramifications ofrace is evident in his articulation of the Curse of Cain in his “Visions ofMoses,” revelations published in Smith’s lifetime and canonized as the Bookof Moses after his death.25

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians had equated Cain’s mark withblack Africans for centuries, but white Christians had seized upon the idea tomaintain their status in the racial hierarchy in the seventeenth century.Theologians in the Jacksonian era furthered this trend.26 According to theaccount of the first fratricide in Genesis, God cursed Cain for murdering hisbrother, Abel, in a fit of jealousy. God cursed Cain to be “a fugitive and avagabond” on the earth and marked his skin to warn others against seekingrevenge for Abel’s murder.27

Smith’s account of Abel’s murder at the hands of his brother in a revelationhe received while completing his Visions of Moses added significant detail tothe account in the King James Bible. Smith rendered a more complex narrativethat included Cain’s choice to learn Satan’s secrets in order to “murder and getgain,” only murdering his brother when Satan delivered him into his hands.Cain relocated to the land of Nod where he now bore a divine mark ofdarkness.28 After narrating the generational sinfulness of Cain and hisposterity, Smith’s scripture states, “The seed of Cain were black, and had notplace among” the rest of the human family.29

Smith’s account of Abel’s murder possesses several parallels to theseparation of the Lamanites from the Nephites in the Book of Mormon. Inboth accounts, the elder brother is jealous of the piety and divine favorbestowed upon a younger brother. Both Laman and Cain become infuriated,

24“Fanaticism,” Rochester Observer, June 9, 1831; and “Mormonites,” The Sun, August 18,1831.

25For an explanation of the Book of Moses, see Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: RoughStone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 131–142. Another explanation can be found inMichael HubbardMacKay, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, Grant Underwood, Robert J. Woodford, andWilliamG. Hartley, eds., Documents, Volume 1: July 1828–June 1831 (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’sPress, 2013), 151–152.

26Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 41–79, 178–182; and Goetz, Baptism of Early Virginia, 86–112. The historian Stephen R. Haynes argues that in America Joseph Smith popularized the notionthat blackness was Cain’s mark—although it had been around in the Protestant Atlantic world formore than a century before. See Haynes, Noah’s Curse, 15.

27Genesis 4:8–15 (King James Version).28“Old Testament Revision 1,” The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed June 13, 2017, http://www.

josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/old-testament-revision-1/11.29See “Old Testament Revision 1,” The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed May 10, 2017, http://

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either murder or attempt to murder their brothers, and geographically separatethemselves from their siblings. Moreover, in both cases, Smith’s scripturenarrated the placing of some sort of mark upon the body of the offender.Indeed, a failure to adhere to God’s commandments results in the removal ofdivine favor and the perpetuation of the divine curse or mark. Smith’siteration of Genesis 4 tethered Cain’s mark, like the Lamanites’ skins ofblackness, to personal righteousness and familial relationships. Sins thatcaused divine curses also made the Lamanite people “fugitive[s] and . . .vagabond[s],” literally without a family or home.30 The mark signified thedissolution of family bonds while simultaneously labeling physicalcharacteristics as reflections of individual obedience to God’s commandments.

Another theological development of Smith’s cemented the link between thephysical body and personal righteousness. In 1833, the Mormon prophetdictated a revelation that addressed Mormon eschatology and soteriology inthe bulk of its text, although one section articulated an uncommoninterpretation of the relationship between body and spirit. Writing in thevoice of Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith declared, “The spirit and the body is thesoul of man.”31 Few, if any, theologians had labeled the spirit and body asone.32 Defining the soul as both physical and intangible spirit formallyenunciated what had previously been an implicit relationship between anindividual’s personal righteousness and their physical body. Race, in short,was both corporeal and spiritual in nature.

III. ELIJAH ABEL: SOUL MADE WHITE, ROBES GLISTENING

Joseph Smith’s likely religio-racial hopes materialized in the person of ElijahAbel, a convert of African descent to Mormonism. Abel’s conversion madehim “actually of the seed of Abraham,” as Christians believed the blood ofChrist made converts an heir of salvation.33 After all, in the words ofMormon hymnist, printer, and theologian W. W. Phelps, anyone who had

30“Old Testament Revision 1,” The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed May 10, 2017, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/old-testament-revision-1?p=11&.

31See “Revelation, 27–28 December 1832 [D&C 88:1–126],” in Documents, Volume 2: July1831–January 1833, ed. Matthew C. Godfrey, Mark Ashurst-McGee, Grant Underwood, RobertJ. Woodford, and William G. Hartley, The Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: ChurchHistorian’s Press, 2013), 337.

32The Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg had suggested a link between the physical body andimmortal spirit but not to the degree that Smith did with his revelation. See “Revelation, 27–28December 1832 [D&C 88:1–126],” 337n264.

33“Discourse, between circa 26 June and circa 2 July 1839, as Reported byWillard Richards,” TheJoseph Smith Papers, accessed August 10, 2018, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/discourse-between-circa-26-june-and-circa-2-july-1839-as-reported-by-willard-richards/1, 15.

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faith in Christ “were equally entitled to the blessings of Abraham, whether theywere his fleshly seed or not; it mattered not from whom they descended; for ifthrough faith they were enabled to get into Christ Jesus, they would beconsidered Abraham’s children and heirs according to the promise.”34 Thistransformation led to Abel’s ordination to the office of Seventy inMormonism’s ecclesiastical priesthood hierarchy, a responsibility connectedto missionary work.35 He also received a “patriarchal blessing” andparticipated in new liturgy introduced to Mormonism in their first temple atKirtland, Ohio, called “washings and anointing.”36 He proselytized as amissionary in cities with large black populations in the United States andCanada and presided over both whites and peoples of African descent inOhio.37 Smith did not require Abel to work under the close supervision ofwhites, like his contemporary Christians who restricted black preachers did,although some white missionaries asked him to do so by the end of hismission.38 Abel’s ordination to the Mormon priesthood and ministry, thoughhe was a “mullato,” demonstrates that Smith viewed Abel as a spiritual equaland that he possessed the talents and capability to lead peoples of all races.39

Abel preached to both blacks and whites, embodying Joseph Smith’smultiracial religious vision. Whether an individual descended from “Shem,Ham, or Japheth, in Christ they should be blessed; for God will abound toall who are in Christ Jesus.”40

Elijah Abel’s own patriarchal blessing demonstrates the promises and limitsof Smith’s racial egalitarianism. A patriarchal blessing is a blessing from anordained patriarch (in the vein of Old Testament patriarchs like Abraham),which dispenses direction and advice to the receiver. The blessing alsodeclares the blood lineage of the receiver in relation to his or her Israelite

34W.W. Phelps, “TheGospelNo.V,”LatterDay Saints’Messenger&Advocate, February 1835, 73.35For a complete description of the term “Seventy” in LDS parlance, see Alan K. Parrish,

“Seventy,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, accessed June 7, 2017, http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Seventy.

36Stevenson, “‘A Negro Preacher’: The Worlds of Elijah Ables,” 169, 171, 176, 204. Stevensonuses the name “Ables,” but the man is identified in most publications as “Abel.” For more on thetemple ordinances/liturgy at Kirtland, see Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 310–316. Smith calledthese liturgical rites washings and anointings. See Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Brent M.Rogers, eds., Journals, Volume 3: May 1843–June 1844, The Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City:Church Historian’s Press, 2015), xix–xxii.

37Stevenson, “‘A Negro Preacher’: The Worlds of Elijah Ables,” 191–196, 203–209.38Ibid., 211. See also Irons, The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity, 46–50. Irons further argues

that there was an increased emphasis on oversight of black evangelicals by white evangelicals afterthe Nat Turner Rebellion. See Irons, The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity, 169–210.

39Stevenson, “‘A Negro Preacher’: The Worlds of Elijah Ables,” 223.40Phelps, “The Gospel No. V,” 73.



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heritage.41 This mingling of biological families and religious communitycreated a new “sacerdotal family” that allowed converts born outside ofperceived Israelite bloodlines to join the Abrahamic covenant. In historianSamuel Brown’s words, patriarchal “blessings represent one of the firstindications that early Mormons” would embrace religious innovationscalibrated to extend the Christian Gospel and Abrahamic covenant to allpeople.42 The earliest church patriarch in Mormonism, Joseph Smith Sr., thefather of the prophet, pronounced Elijah Abel’s patriarchal blessing, as hedid for hundreds of other Mormons from 1834 to 1840.43 Abel’s blessingdoes not declare Abel’s status as a blood member of the house of Israel.44

However, the blessing’s contents yield valuable information. Abel’s blessingpromised a future ordaining to the ecclesiastical office of elder and that hewould “be made equal to thy brethren and thy soul [shall be] be white ineternity and thy robes glittering.”45

Joseph Smith Sr.’s blessing tied Abel to the ecclesiastical priesthood.According to historian Samuel Brown, “Priesthood offered a metaphysicalsubstitute for blood, a power that defined and transformed human beings andtheir relationships.” For Abel, this meant that, despite his non-Israeliteheritage, his ordination made him a part of Israel. In other words, “Biologicalties could be unreliable; sacerdotal ties were secure.”46 Ordination to theMormon ecclesiastical priesthood made Abel a “son of Moses,” a member ofthe bloodline of Israel and an heir to the Abrahamic covenant according to arevelation received by Joseph Smith in 1832. This line of thinking is presentin other patriarchal blessings. For example, in 1839, Joseph Smith Sr.declared a white man named John Landers a spiritual “orphan” outside of thebloodlines of Israel. However, the elder Smith promised him that, through hispatriarchal blessing, his blood had been transformed so that “little or nogentile blood remain[ed] in him.”47 Despite the wording of these blessings, it

41For a basic overview of patriarchal blessings, see William James Mortimer, “PatriarchalBlessings,” The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, accessed May 10, 2017, http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Patriarchal_Blessings.

42See Samuel M. Brown, “Early Mormon Adoption Theology and the Mechanics of Salvation,”Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 6, 22.

43Irene M. Bates and E. Gary Smith, “Appendix A,” in Lost Legacy: The Mormon Office ofPresiding Patriarch, ed. Irene M. Bates and E. Gary Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,2002), 233.

44About one-third of the patriarchal blessings bestowed by Joseph Smith Sr. do not declareIsraelite lineage. However, Abel’s conversion to Mormonism would have included him in theAbrahamic covenant—and thus in the house of Israel. See Mauss, “In Search of Ephraim,” 145.

45H. Michael Marquardt, Early Patriarchal Blessings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-daySaints (Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2007), 99.

46See Brown, “Early Mormon Adoption Theology and the Mechanics of Salvation,” 29.47John Landers’s Patriarchal Blessing, quoted in Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon

People, 108.

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is impossible to determine whether Smith or any other Mormon accepted Abel’sordination as proof of a physical transformation.48

Smith’s belief that both the body and the spirit formed the “soul of man”alters the way in which the statement “soul be white” should be received.Abel’s patriarchal blessing did not merely promise his soul’s future status asclean before God (symbolized by his glittering robes). When consideringJoseph Smith Jr.’s teachings on the body and spirit comprising the human“soul,” it is possible that the prophet’s father could have been prophesyingthat Abel’s skin would physically transform from black to white. Both hissoul (body and spirit) would be white as his promised glittering robes “ineternity,” although his skin would not become white immediately, perhapsnot even during Abel’s lifetime. This uncertainty about the timing of Abel’sgentile blood purge reveals the ways in which Smith’s teachings surroundingthe doctrine of racial redemption were not fully formed when Abel receivedhis patriarchal blessing. The Mormon prophet’s haphazard attempts to mendthe racial problems of his day through religion were optimistic but far fromfirm.During the years Abel served his missions, received the Mormon

ecclesiastical priesthood, and led local congregations, other Americans statedtheir belief that Christianity would help hereditary heathens overcome theirlowly spiritual station. For instance, in 1838, future United States presidentJohn Tyler opined, “[God] works most inscrutably to the understandings ofmen; the Negro is torn from Africa, a barbarian, ignorant and idolatrous.”Tyler believed that, in spite of their natural predilections, Africans couldbecome “civilized, enlightened, and Christian” through exposure to whiteculture.49 Joseph Smith’s religious worldview concurred with Tyler’s as faras he believed that peoples of African descent would become “civilized,enlightened” through conversion. However, he also took the process a stepfurther. He believed that converts could eventually be released from theirracial curses by God.However, Smith’s spiritual egalitarianism was tempered in the political

sphere. In 1833, the Mormon newspaper editor W. W. Phelps wrote anarticle titled “Free People of Color.” Phelps quoted “clauses from the laws ofMissouri,” which enumerated the status of free blacks in the American state

48See “Revelation, 22–23 September 1832 [D&C 84],” in Documents, Volume 2, 297. Becauseless than one-third of early Mormon patriarchal blessings declare an Israelite lineage, it is possiblethat Joseph Smith or his followers did not view all whites as heirs of the Abrahamic covenant. Ibelieve that Landers is white because census records identity a John Launders living nearNauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois, as white. That name is the closest match to Landers and,given irregular spelling, is likely to be the same man. United States 1860 Census, Nauvoo,Hancock County.

49John Tyler, “Virginia Colonization Society,” American Colonization Society, The AfricanRepository and Colonial Journal 14, no. 4 (1838): 119.




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that housed the Mormon Zion. Phelps closed the article by proclaimingMormons had “no special rule in the Church, as to people of color[; therefore] let prudence guide, and while they, as well as we, are in thehands of a merciful God, we say: Shun every appearance of evil.” He alsopraised the work of abolitionists and those that called for black Africanrepatriation, speaking favorably of “abolishing slavery, and colonizing theblacks, in Africa.”50

Phelps’s article sparked a firestorm of controversy. The citizens of JacksonCounty decried the words of the non-slaveholding Mormons and labeledthem “deluded fanaticks [sic].” These Missourians believed Phelps’s articleinvited free blacks from other states to convert to Mormonism, organize, andattack whites.51 Fear of slave and native uprisings were common features ofregions in which African slaves outnumbered whites.52 Accordingly, thereactions to Phelps’s article serve to illuminate Missouri’s political and socialsensitivities to slavery. His article appeared only fifteen years after theMissouri Compromise and four years after Nat Turner’s Rebellion inVirginia, where the religious leader had organized a massive, failed slaverevolt through contacts acquired in his ministry.53 As sectional tensionsbegan to escalate again in the midst of abolitionism, the citizens of slaveregions were often as vigilantly suspicious of political interlopers from theNorth as they were of their chattel slaves. Smith attempted to dampenthe Missourians’ fears by directing Phelps to publish a statement that assuredthe western settlers that Mormons were “opposed to having free people ofcolor admitted into the state; and we say, that none will be admitted into theChurch.”54 Smith hesitated to proselytize peoples of African descent for

50WilliamW. Phelps, “Free People of Color,” Evening and the Morning Star, July 1833, 109–111.51See “Journal, December 1841–December 1842,” Journals, Volume 2: December 1841–April

1843, ed. Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Richard Lloyd Anderson, The Joseph SmithPapers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2011), 52. Fear of slaves rising up againstwhites had been a local and national concern in the United States for some time. Alan Taylorhas written that Virginians (and logically extended to other slaveholding societies) “imagined adreaded ‘internal enemy’ who might, at any moment, rebel in a midnight massacre to butcherwhite men, women, and children in their beds.” See Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slaveryand War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 7–8.

52For a thorough treatment of the importance of the Missouri Compromise in relation to itsimpact on sectional crisis and the importance of slavery in the early American republic, seeRobert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning ofAmerica (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). For the Jeffersonian view onthe Missouri Compromise, including the hope that the expansion of slavery would lead to itsdemise, see Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 109–146.

53For more on the religious culture surrounding Nat Turner’s Rebellion, see David F.Allmendinger Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2014); and Irons, The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity, 133–168.

54“Extra,” The Evening and Morning Star, July 16, 1833.

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pragmatic reasons, so as not to provoke the hornet’s nest of slaveholders inMissouri and elsewhere.Latter-day Saint spiritual egalitarianism had significant ramifications for

Mormonism’s reputation, and Joseph Smith sought political safety whilesimultaneously proselytizing peoples of African descent. Nevertheless, earlyMormons offered only a conditional political status to peoples of Africandescent. It was one thing for Joseph Smith to state in the abstract that blackscould acquire white skin; it was another to stick to his theological gunswhen the political cost ran high. Above all else, Smith was a pragmatist whowanted his fledgling church to survive to accomplish the work of preparingfor the Second Coming of Christ. Three years later, despite his earlierstatement, Smith declared that Mormons would not “interfere with slaves [orfreed or escaped slaves], contrary to the mind and will of their masters.”55

The Mormon prophet later supported a gradual abolition plan while he ranfor president, which suggests his views changed on slavery and other raceissues.56 However, his support of abolition came when his own politicalposition and personal safety were much less tenuous. It may not havemattered whether a convert “were Scythian, Barbarian, bond or free, Jew orGentile, Greek or Roman.” Africans, Asians, and Europeans could receiveMormon baptism and officiate in its ordinances and offices, but Mormonsdeclined to defend the rights of Africans if it meant harm would come totheir church.57 He could not afford to take a stand against both Missouriansand his fellow Mormons.In some ways, the inchoateness of Smith’s religio-racial doctrine reflects the

uncertainty around the place of free peoples of African descent in Americanpolitics. Whites that championed abolitionism or colonization reflected anuneasiness with or disapproval of slavery but not a belief in the inherent

55Letter from Joseph Smith to Oliver Cowdery, published inMessenger & Advocate, April 1836,290. For more on the connection between the Curse of Ham and slavery, see Paul Harvey, “‘AServant of Servants Shall He Be’: The Construction of Race in American ReligiousMythologies,” in Religion and the Creation of Ethnicity: An Introduction, ed. Craig Prentiss(New York: New York University Press, 2003), 13–27. Other church groups required a master’spermission for baptism as well. See Larry M. James, “Biracial Fellowship in Antebellum BaptistChurches,” in Masters & Slaves In the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the AmericanSouth, 1740–1870, ed. John B. Boles (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988), 47–48;Robert L. Hall, “Black and White Christians in Florida, 1822–1861,” in Masters & Slaves In theHouse of the Lord, ed. John B. Boles (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988), 86–88;and Randall M. Miller, “Slaves and Southern Catholicism,” in Masters & Slaves In the House ofthe Lord, ed. John B. Boles (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988), 135.

56Specifically, Smith favored compensating slave owners for enslaved persons. Funds would beraised for compensation by selling the western lands of the United States. Joseph Smith, GeneralSmith’s Views of the powers and policy of the government of the United States; General Smith’sviews of the powers and policy of the government of the United States (Nauvoo, Ill.: JohnTaylor, 1844), 9.

57“The Ancient Order of Things,” Latter Day Saints Messenger & Advocate, September 1835.




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equality of African-descended peoples. Politicians that opposed slavery for anynumber of reasons did not necessarily think that black men should receive thesame privileges as white men. When Smith preached his doctrine of racialredemption, it is likely that he separated religious doctrine from political oreconomic equality. Placing a wall between religion and politics allowed himto justify colonization, condemn interracial marriage, and support segregationwhile allowing Abel to serve in Mormonism’s ecclesiastical structure.58

IV. NAUVOO: NEW LITURGY, A NEW “PRIESTHOOD,” AND NEW

POSSIBILITIES

By 1838, Smith’s attempt to straddle religious egalitarianism and politicalsafety came to an unceremonious end. In the fall of 1838, Missourianssecured legal permission to exterminate or otherwise drive Mormons “fromthe state, for the public peace.” Missouri’s governor, Lilburn W. Boggs,wrote that Mormons had committed “outrages beyond all de[s]cription,”59

including “conniving with the Indians, and stirring up the Negroes to rebelagainst their masters, with a multitude of things of a similar character: whichall tend to establish the ignorance and corruption of their authors.”60

Missourians feared the Mormons would join with Indians and “negroes” incombat against their non-Mormon neighbors. Despite Apostle Parley Pratt’sreport that there had never even been as many as “one dozen free negroes ormulattoes” that had joined Smith’s church from 1830 to 1840, Missouriansbelieved Mormons shared the interests of “negroes” over whites.61 AlthoughMormons had attempted to separate their cause from the aims of blacks,

58“Journal, December 1842–June 1844; Book 1, 21 December 1842–10 March 1843,” TheJoseph Smith Papers, accessed August 10, 2018, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-december-1842-june-1844-book-1-21-december-1842-10-march-1843/49?, 43;and Smith, General Smith’s Views of the powers and policy of the government of the United States.

59“‘A History, of the Persecution, of the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter Day Saints inMissouri,’ December 1839–October 1840,” The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed May 10, 2017,http://josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/a-history-of-the-persecution-of-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints-in-missouri-december-1839-october-1840?p=23&.

60Sidney Rigdon, An Appeal to the American People: Being an Account of the Persecutions ofthe Church of Latter Day Saints (Cincinnati: Shepard and Stearns, 1840), 9. For more on theMormon expulsion from Missouri, see Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987); Alex L. Baugh, A Call to Arms: The 1838Mormon Defense of Northern Missouri (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Studies Press,2000); and Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 342–372.

61Parley P. Pratt, Late Persecution of the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter-day Saints; TenThousand American Citizens Robbed, Plundered, and Banished; Others Imprisoned, and OthersMartyred for their Religion. With a Sketch of Their Rise, Progress and Doctrine (New York: J.W. Harrison, 1840), 28.

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Americans racialized Mormons as outsiders, foreigners, and savages.62 Suchcastigations underscore Mormonism’s (imperfectly) inclusive ideas on race inthe midst of other American Christian racial beliefs. Because of unrestattributable to several causes, including racial beliefs, Joseph Smith andseveral other Mormon leaders were arrested and spent much of the fall andwinter of 1838 to 1839 in the confines of the jail at Liberty, Missouri, fortreason and other charges.When Smith escaped from Liberty Jail and established a new Mormon

headquarters at Nauvoo, Illinois, he introduced a revolutionary theology anda slew of rituals. These new teachings and liturgy were designed to tie thehuman race to one another and ensure the salvation of every heir ofthe Abrahamic covenant. The Mormon prophet’s radical new means of tyingthe entire human family to one another through ordinances now onlyperformed in Mormon temples had enormous ramifications for peoples of allraces. Smith framed his religious innovation in the Abrahamic covenant ashe read it from the Bible, combining God’s promises to Abraham with hismission to gather all peoples, regardless of race, to Mormonism.The ordinance of sealing, by which Smith sought to bind men and women to

one another both “in heaven and in earth,” is the most relevant of Mormonism’sliturgical innovations here.63 Historians have often used the ordinance of sealingand plural marriage as interchangeable terms. However, to say Smith practicedplural marriage oversimplifies his religious innovations. Smith “sealed” orbound individuals and couples into his eternal household while binding othermen and women together as heads of their own eternal kinship networks.Those men and women were in turn to be sealed to their children (biologicalor adopted as spiritual progeny), individual women, or other couples, creatinga hierarchical system that placed authority with the original sealed couple.Smith viewed this as an outgrowth of the Christian notion of adoption,wherein a convert to Christianity became a son or daughter of God throughconversion (and, in the Mormon tradition, baptism). Smith’s theological twistreflected his understanding of the Abrahamic covenant. Smith preached whenhe sealed man and woman to one another that it would guarantee theirsalvation as well as connect them to God and to himself.64 At its heart,sealing promised “a network of eternal belonging for the Latter-day Saints”through a “broader goal of establishing the heavenly family.” The Mormonprophet’s innovations opened up the definition of family to mean anyone

62Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 20–23.63Matthew 28:18 (King James Version).64Smith preached that sealing “secure[d] their posterity so that they cannot be lost but will be saved

by virtue of the covenant of their father.” “History, 1838–1856, volume E-1 [1 July 1843–30 April1844], The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed August 9, 2016, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/history-1838-1856-volume-e-1-1-july-1843-30-april-1844?p=62.”



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within an eternal kinship network. The endowment’s narrative arc followedAdam and Eve, opening an expansive view of “family” and relationships.65

Smith and his compatriots called this new liturgy, including the sealingordinance, “the priesthood”—what I call “temple priesthood”—separate frombut connected to Mormonism’s ecclesiastical authority. Smith introduced theconcept of ecclesiastical priesthood in the early 1830s as he created churchoffices to meet the needs of a growing church.66 The temple priesthoodoriginated during Smith’s formulation of the new liturgy, what today iscalled the endowment and sealing ritual.67 Many have called the sealingritual “polygamy,” but Joseph Smith never referred to these rites as“marriages.” Instead, they functioned as an initiation ritual into an “order” ofpriesthood with special responsibilities that men and women joined throughthe endowment and sealing liturgy, in addition to accepting positions in theecclesiastical priesthood. Historian Kathleen Flake defines the men whoserved as priests in this new order of priesthood as those having “the right toaccess the powers of heaven and to mediate or exercise those heavenlypowers for the benefit of others on earth.”68 Mormon men that held theecclesiastical priesthood were expected to officiate in ordinances and governthe church. Mormon men and women that received their endowment and thesealing ordinance counted themselves as members of a temple priesthood.

Smith’s new temple liturgy, like patriarchal blessings, blurred the linesbetween biological family and Mormonism’s religious community identitymarker, the Abrahamic covenant. Mormon men and women that were sealedto one another were given power to save those that were sealed to them. Oneof Smith’s sermons in March 1844 indicated that Mormonism’s new liturgyhad the power to ensure the salvation of any person that participated in theordinance of sealing. As Smith explained, “When you get to heaven tell yourfather that what you seal on earth should be sealed in heaven. I will walkthrough the gate of heaven and Claim what I seal & those that follow me &my Council.”69 Mormons that had received the sealing ordinance or othertemple liturgy from Joseph Smith could expect to “mediate or exercise . . .heavenly powers for the benefit of others on earth [or in heaven].”70

65See Samuel Morris Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early MormonConquest of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 203–247.

66See Gregory A. Prince, Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood (SaltLake City: Signature, 1995); and “Priesthood,” The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed May 10,2017, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/topic/priesthood.

67See Hedges, Smith, and Rogers, Journals, Volume 3: May 1843–June 1844, xix–xxii.68Kathleen Flake, The Emotional and Priestly Logic of Plural Marriage, Leonard J. Arrington

Mormon History Lecture Series 15 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2010), 10–11.69Wilford Woodruff, “March 10, 1844,” Wilford Woodruff Journal, 1833–1898, ed. by Scott G.

Kenney (Midvale, Utah: Signature, 1983–1985), 2:364.70Flake, The Emotional and Priestly Logic of Plural Marriage, 11.

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In a revelation given to his wife, Emma Smith, the Mormon prophet framedthis liturgy in Abrahamic terms, invoking the plural marriages and spiritualblessings of the patriarch and his sons, Isaac and Jacob.71 In the words ofhistorian Jonathan A. Stapley, “kinship, priesthood, government, andsalvation became synonymous” in early Mormonism as the temple liturgyunfolded.72 Mormons believed that men and couples’ priesthood, power, andhonor were reflected in the number of individuals sealed to them. Smithsealed himself to the family members of other Mormon hierarchs in order toforge eternal and temporal relationships through temple liturgy. Thoseindividuals had others sealed to them, creating a great chain of hierarchicalrelationships that would eventually connect the entire human race to oneanother through interlinking covenant relationships between all of humanityand God.73 The hierarchical nature of the “sealing” of one person to anotheralso created relationships designed to connect the entire human family to oneanother, with Smith at the top of the chain (what historian Samuel Brownhas called the Chain of Belonging).74 The Mormon prophet shaped these“welding links” between his closest friends and confidantes with the beliefthat those relationships would perpetuate throughout the eternities.75 Hetethered these relationships to Abrahamic blessings of priesthood and havingchildren as numerous as sands on the seashore or stars in the sky.

V. JANE ELIZABETH MANNING JAMES AND THE INCORPORATION OF

AFRICANS INTO THE SEALING RITUAL

Only one person of African descent may have been asked to participate inSmith’s Nauvoo-era temple liturgy. Jane Elizabeth Manning James hadconverted to Mormonism in Connecticut, probably in 1839, and later led agroup of free African Americans to Nauvoo from the eastern United States.76

71“Revelation, 12 July 1843 [D&C 132],” The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed May 10, 2017,http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/revelation-12-july-1843-dc-132.

72Jonathan A. Stapley, “Women and Mormon Authority,” in Women and the LDS Church inHistorical and Contemporary Perspective, ed. Matthew B. Bowman and Kate Holbrook (SaltLake City: University of Utah Press, 2016), 104.

73The number of spiritual dependents correspondingly offered greater power, honor, and prestigeto the head of the household. This is similar to the ways that white Americans viewed theconstructions of their own households, especially slave households. See Stephanie McCurry,Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture ofthe Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 58–59. Raymond Lee Muncy,Sex and Marriage in Utopian Communities (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1973), 133.

74Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth, 203–247, especially 208.75Hedges, Smith, and Rogers, “September 11, 1842,” Journals, Volume 2: December 1841–April

1843, 148.76Jane Manning James autobiography, circa 1902, MS 4425, Church History Library, Church of

Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah. For an annotated account of James’s



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When her group arrived in Nauvoo, Joseph and Emma Smith invited James tolive in their household as a servant. In the course of her work, Smith permittedher to “handle” the Urim and Thummim, the tools Smith used to translate theBook of Mormon.77

According to an interview with James recorded nearly sixty years later, shebecame aware of Joseph Smith’s sealings in 1843 from women she called“Brother Josephs [sic] four wives.” These women asked James, “Whatwould you think if a man had more wives than one?” She responded byjumping up, clapping her hands, and exclaiming, “That’s good.” One ofSmith’s “wives” approvingly assured the other women, “She is all right, justlisten she believes it all now.”78 Later, in return for her friendship andloyalty, Emma Smith reportedly offered to have James sealed into theSmiths’ eternal household “as a child.” James reported to her biographerthat, after two weeks of considering the offer, she replied to Emma, “NoMam [sic]! Because I did not understand or know what it meant.”79

James’s sealing as a “child” does not make sense in the context of Smith’sactions surrounding his new liturgy. Men and women were sealed as thespiritually adopted “children” of couples, or heirs to an eternal household,only after the death of Joseph Smith. Only one “adoption” took place in the1840s, and it was to a man who was not “adopted” until after Smith’s death.Women became, in later parlance, “wives” rather than adopted members of aspiritual family.80 The way that James positions herself in her autobiographypresents several pieces of evidence that open the possibility of her beingoffered a place in Smith’s eternal household. The first sentence of herautobiography begins with her leaving her family to live with “a family ofwhite people.” She rehearses her experiences with the “Gift of Tongues.”When one of the children in the family became ill, her traveling companions“healed the child.”81 Through this narrative, she places herself within awhite family as well as the Mormon milieu of charismatic spiritual gifts.

This candid confession suggests that Emma may have introduced the conceptof joining their eternal family in theological terms that James (or Emma) did notcompletely understand. The context of Emma Smith’s offer is unclear, but it is

autobiography, see Quincy D. Newell, “The Autobiography and Interview of Jane ElizabethManning James,” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 2 (2013): 251–291.

77See Max Perry Mueller, “Playing Jane: Re-presenting Black Mormon Memory throughReenacting the Black Mormon Past,” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 4 (2013): 528–529.

78“James Autobiography,” 19. Smith himself never used the term “wife.”79Ibid., 20.80See Jonathan A. Stapley, “Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism,” Journal of Mormon

History 37, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 69–74. John Bernhisel was sealed to Joseph Smith after hisdeath—the only incident of a man being sealed into Joseph Smith’s eternal household in Nauvoo.

81“James Autobiography,” 17.

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likely that she meant to invite James to join the Smith’s kinship network,thereby connecting James to the spiritual lineage of the Smith family insteadof the cursed lineage of Cain or Ham. Because the first Mormons whoparticipated in the ritual of sealing did not define their marriage partners as“wives,” “child” may have been deemed a sufficient designation for therelationship. Another reason for the designation of “child”—rather thansealing partner or “wife”—is Emma Smith’s distrust of her husband inmatters related to the sealing ordinance.82 Because women of African descentwere often viewed as sexual objects, Emma may have been especially carefulto designate James as a “child” instead of as an equal partner in the Smith’skinship network, which could have led to a sexual relationship with liturgicalsanction.The possibility of James’s proposed sealing as a wife presents several

interesting interpretations. Considering the soteriological qualities ofMormonism’s temple liturgy, Smith could have viewed James’s sealing as away of saving both her and her family “by virtue of the covenant” she wouldenter into with Joseph and Emma Smith.83 If the offer of sealing took place,there is a possibility that the Smiths viewed this as a means of incorporatingnot only white women but women of African descent into the templepriesthood. It is also possible that in Smith’s developing cosmologicalworldview he considered inviting individuals of African descent to join thetemple priesthood in the same way that he permitted men of African descentto become a part of Mormonism’s ecclesiastical priesthood. In any event,inclusion in Smith’s eternal kinship network would have cemented James’splace in the Abrahamic covenant and created a familial relationship withJames. She would not be like the dark-skinned Lamanites and Cainites whohad separated themselves from their families, the Abrahamic covenant, andGod’s ecclesiastical priesthood through their wickedness. She would be aproper member of Smith’s family and a true heir of Abraham.This status as an heir of Abraham is reflected in a patriarchal blessing that

James received from Joseph Smith’s brother Hyrum in 1844. Hyrum Smith,then serving as the Presiding Patriarch in the LDS Church, declared thatJames was an heir of the lineage of Ham. While this is not a surprise,considering contemporary beliefs about black Africans and the lineage ofHam or Cain, Patriarch Smith promised that God could have James’s divine

82Emma Smith gave and withdrew her permission for her husband to engage in the sealing ritualin 1842 and eventually left Mormonism in part because of the sexual relationships that her husbandentered into because of the sealing ordinance. See Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery,Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 130–156.

83See “History, 1838–1856, volume E-1 [1 July 1843–30 April 1844], The Joseph Smith Papers,accessed August 9, 2016, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/history-1838-1856-volume-e-1-1-july-1843-30-april-1844?p=62.”






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“mark” taken from her “and stamped with his image if she remained faithful.”84

When Emma Smith offered to “adopt” James, she would have relied upon astrain of her husband’s thought—namely, that individuals could overcometheir cursed heritage and become heirs to the blessings of Abraham, Isaac,and Jacob.

This reflects what historian Max Perry Mueller calls a “covenantal contract,”wherein a man or woman could overcome the supposed curse associated withtheir linage through their faithfulness. This contract hearkens back to whatJoseph Smith Sr. promised Elijah Abel in his patriarchal blessing—thatthrough faithfulness he could “be made equal to thy brethren and thy soul bewhite in eternity and thy robes glittering.”85 Although neither James nor Abelis given a specific date for when their covenantal status would be reflected intheir outward appearance, it seems that the idea of racial redemption wasalive and well in Smith’s family, or at least among church patriarchs, whowere given the religious imperative to declare spiritual lineage.86

VI. SUCCESSION, AMERICAN RACE CULTURE, AND THE COSMOLOGY

OF CAIN’S CURSE

Joseph Smith met a violent death at the hands of a mob in 1844, at least in partbecause of issues related to the new sealing liturgy he introduced in Nauvoo.The first Mormon prophet had outlined at least eight different plans forsuccession in the LDS presidency during his lifetime, which left his churchin a theological and ecclesiastical crisis.87 Several leaders jostled with oneanother to become Smith’s successor, including Smith’s longtime counselor,Sidney Rigdon, and Brigham Young, President of the Quorum of the TwelveApostles. Rigdon argued that no man could replace Smith but that he wouldact as the church’s guardian to protect Smith’s doctrines from corruption. Healso downplayed the importance of the temple liturgy. Rigdon argued, “It[was] not necisary [sic] to build this Temple . . . if the Temple is build [sic],the Twelve have no power to administer the endowment [liturgy].”88 In

84Jane Manning James’s Patriarchal Blessing, quoted in Mueller, Race and the Making of theMormon People, 148.

85Marquardt, Early Patriarchal Blessings, 99.86Mueller’s chapter on Jane Manning James is the best treatment of how James’s autobiography

and patriarchal blessing created racial meaning in early Mormonism. Mueller, Race and the Makingof the Mormon People, 119–152.

87D. Michael Quinn, “The Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844,” BYU Studies 16 (Winter 1976):187–233.

88Letter from Orson Hyde to Brigham Young, 26 September 1844, Brigham Young IncomingCorrespondence, Brigham Young Office Files, 1832–1878, Church History Library, Church ofJesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

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contrast, Young’s case for the ecclesiastical authority of the apostles hingedupon the argument that Smith had conferred upon them the rights andprivilege of governance in the event of his death.89

The majority of Nauvoo Mormons chose Young over Rigdon by virtue ofYoung’s claim to have authority over the sealing liturgy and templeordinances. However, Sidney Rigdon did not give up without a fight. Hetried to persuade influential Mormons to follow him instead of Young byarguing that only Smith could pronounce doctrine and that it was Rigdon’sduty to conserve Smith’s teachings in perpetuity without any newrevelations. He would serve as a guardian of the church without holding theoffice of church president occupied by Smith.90

In February 1845, Apostle Orson Hyde sought to discredit Rigdon as a viableoption for church leadership by arguing that the apostles held the keys of thekingdom and the authority to perform priesthood ordinances.91 He proceededto outline the Mormon belief in a premortal council of all God’s children, inwhich Satan had attempted to overthrow God’s plan for human trial andredemption. According to Hyde, Lucifer, like Rigdon, had attempted tousurp priesthood authority for his own glorification and had been cast out forhis disobedience.92 Hyde likened Mormons who could not make up theirminds about following Young or Rigdon to those who had been on the fencewhen choosing between God’s and Satan’s respective plans for salvationbefore the world’s creation. Hyde declared that members of the “Africanrace” had not fully supported God’s plan. As a result, on earth they receivedthe cursed bodies of the “negro.”93

In the weeks following Hyde’s speech, Apostle John Taylor wrote in theofficial LDS newspaper, Times and Season, that, because Noah’s son Hamhad dishonored the priesthood, his posterity had been cursed as a result.Taylor argued that to help Africans overcome their position through abolition(or other means) was “to make void the curse of God.” His article alsounfavorably compared Ham to Shem and Japheth (Noah’s other sons) in

89August 8, 1844, PM minutes in unknown scribe’s hand (General Minutes Collection), cited inRichard S. Van Wagoner, “The Making of a Mormon Myth: The 1844 Transfiguration of BrighamYoung,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 28, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 11nn42–43. See alsoAndrew F. Ehat, “Joseph Smith’s Introduction of Temple Ordinances and the 1844 MormonSuccession Question” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1982).

90LaJean P. Carruth and Robin S. Jensen, “Sidney Rigdon’s Plea to the Saints: Transcription ofThomas Bullock’s Shorthand Notes from the August 8, 1844, Morning Meeting,” BYU Studies 53,no. 2 (2014): 135–136.

91See Orson Hyde, Speech of Elder Orson Hyde delivered before the High Priests quorum inNauvoo, April 27th, 1845 upon the course and conduct of Mr. Sidney Rigdon, and upon themerits of his claims to the presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints(Liverpool: James and Woodburn, 1845), 10–11.

92Ibid., 1.93Ibid., 31.




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order to demonstrate they had been blessed for their righteousness with lightskin.94

Hyde and Taylor laid the groundwork to undo Joseph Smith’s teachings onthe redemption of race. These apostles viewed skin color as an inescapablepunishment for black Africans because of their own volition (premortalfence sitting) or their ancestors’ choices (made by Ham or Cain). Hyde’spronouncements reject what Joseph Smith had told him in the course of aconversation about the “situation of the Negro” in 1844.95 Smith hadinformed Hyde that Africans had “come into the world slaves mentally &phy[s]ically,” and if one changed their circumstances with white men, theywould behave like whites. Nonetheless, Smith desired to “confine [Negroes]by strict Laws to their own Species [and] put them on nationalEqualization.”96 Smith supported African colonization and believed that theyhad the potential to act, think, vote, and govern as white men did over theirown kind.97 Hyde and Taylor’s published writings reveal that Smith’s ideason racial redemption had begun to erode less than a year after his death.

However, the doctrine of racial redemption had not disappeared entirely.Joseph Smith’s brother William, serving as Church Patriarch after HyrumSmith’s assassination alongside the Mormon prophet, gave a blessing toJoseph T. Ball, a Mormon of African descent.98 Ball’s blessing declared thathis name was “enrolled with the house of Israel upon sacred Recordsdeposited in the archives of the temple, as a memorial and a testimony of thyfaithfulness and good works.” Counting his name with those on the rolls ofthe temple made him an heir of the Abrahamic covenant to whom “theblessing of the Holy Priesthood been handed down and thou art of thatRoyal Stock.”99

William Smith’s declarations belie several important tenets. First, it showsthat the patriarchal blessing was viewed by those that delivered them as ameans of grafting non-Israelites into the house of Israel and the Abrahamic

94John Taylor, “A Short Chapter on a Long Subject,” Times and Seasons, April 1, 1845, 857. TheCurses of Ham and Cain were used interchangeably in antebellum America. See Goldenberg, TheCurse of Ham; and Haynes, Noah’s Curse.

95The question probably arose due to Hyde’s fear that an earlier defection from Mormonismbrought upon him the Curse of Cain. See Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, 106.

96Hedges, Smith, and Rogers, “January 2, 1843,” Journals, Volume 2: December 1841–April1843, 212.

97Smith’s notion of confining blacks harmonized with many contemporary plans to fix the “slaveproblem” by returning slaves to Africa. Colonization was a “liberal” plan to eradicate slavery duringthe first half of the nineteenth century. See Claude Andrew Clegg III, The Price of Liberty: AfricanAmericans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

98Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst are the most recent historians to declare Ball to be“African American.” See Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, The Mormon Church andBlacks: A Documentary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 19, 30.

99Marquardt, Early Patriarchal Blessings, 320.

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covenant. Ball’s “Royal Stock” signified his worthiness of receiving theecclesiastical office of high priest. Second, William Smith announcing Ball’senrollment in the name of the “sacred Records . . . of the Temple” probablyrefers to records kept by Mormons that granted individuals access to templeordinances and, eventually, to exaltation. The Quorum of the TwelveApostles controlled these records and, with them, access to the temple.William Smith was likely declaring that Ball could participate in templeliturgy and thereby become a member of the temple priesthood through thewording of his patriarchal blessing.100 However, the LDS Churchexcommunicated William Smith in October 1845, less than six monthsbefore Mormons began to leave Missouri for the Great Basin. WithWilliam’s departure went the final link to Joseph Smith’s doctrine of racialredemption. The doctrine was only ever espoused by the Mormon prophetand members of his family; it therefore did not survive the trek west to Utah.

VII. EXODUS: INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE AND THE MINGLING OF BLOOD

By February 1846, violent conflicts between Mormons and non-Mormonsprecipitated a westward-moving Mormon exodus from Nauvoo. In Februaryof that year, William McCary, a man of African descent, converted to theLDS Church and married Lucia Stanton, the white daughter of a prominentMormon.101 McCary fabricated a biracial identity and claimed to be halfNative American and half African when he joined the Mormons at WinterQuarters, Nebraska. He also proclaimed himself as “Adam, the Ancient ofdays” and claimed to have received several revelations for the church. Heproceeded to enter into sexual relationships with women whom he claimedto have been sealed by Mormon liturgy. Brigham Young had never given hispermission for McCary to be sealed to other women, and, as a result, theLDS Church excommunicated him.102

100This idea can be traced to Joseph Smith’s belief that one’s namebeingwritten on the records of thetithing payers of the church (later, those deemed worthy to enter the temple), called “The Book of theLawof the Lord” by the 1840s. I thankDavidGrua andRobin Scott Jensen for bringing this connectiontomyattention. “Letter toWilliamW. Phelps, 27November 1832,”The JosephSmith Papers, accessedJune 13, 2017, http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-william-w-phelps-27-november-1832/1#full-13382596199283123831.

101For more on McCary’s life and how it sheds light on race, religion, and gender in nineteenth-century America, see Angela Pulley Hudson, Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a WhiteMormon became Famous Indians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

102Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 129–133. Young believed the president of the LDSChurch was the only person who could authorize plural marriages or additional sealings. SeeLetter from Brigham Young to William Smith, August 9, 1845, Brigham Young Office Files,Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah; andLarry G. Murphy, J. Gordon Melton, and Gary L. Ward, eds., Encyclopedia of African AmericanReligions (New York: Routledge, 2001), 170.



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Although LDS Church leaders insistedMcCary’s interracial marriage had notbeen the root cause of his excommunication, Apostle Parley Pratt declaredMcCary had the “blood of Ham in him which linege [sic] was cursed asregards to priesthood.” Although speaking about those Mormons that wishedto follow McCary rather than LDS Church leaders, Pratt framed McCary’sclaims to the temple priesthood as theologically impossible.103 Furthermore,in 1847, at roughly the same time as McCary’s excommunication, BrighamYoung also learned that Enoch Lewis, the son of a black Mormon mannamed Q. Walker Lewis, had married a white woman. Historian ConnellO’Donovan has suggested that Lewis’s son’s marriage to a white womansparked Young’s formation of Mormonism’s priesthood and templerestriction because he feared black men entering into plural marriagerelationships with a myriad of white women and mixing the blood of Israelwith those outside the Abrahamic covenant.104

Pratt’s statement about McCary, John Taylor’s article in the Times andSeasons, and Orson Hyde’s speech to the Nauvoo High Priest Quorumdemonstrate that several of Smith’s apostles did not share his vision for aunited human family regardless of race or skin color. It is likely that Smith’snonlinear beliefs about race and priesthood caused confusion among theLatter-day Saints leadership that survived him. When a race issue arose, theyembraced cultural and theological norms rather than trying to sift out whattheir founding prophet would have wanted them to do. The close proximityof the McCary excommunication and Lewis’s marriage likely led Young tothink about the role of race and the marriage of whites and blacks. Becausehe did not have a concrete teaching from Smith to use as precedent, he reliedupon his apostles’ (and probably his own) American theological and culturalunderstandings about mixing blood. In this way, Young reiterated his soleauthority to authorize plural marriages and accepted a commonplacetheological and social view as Mormon doctrine.

VIII. COSMOLOGICAL BREAK: BRIGHAM YOUNG’S 1852 ADDRESS TO

THE UTAH LEGISLATURE

Brigham Young did not publicly offer his opinion on excluding Africans fromtemple priesthood until the winter of 1852. Until recently, however, the contextin which he delivered his theological justifications for excluding peoples ofAfrican descent from the house of Israel was not clear. Speaking in the

103General Minutes, Church Historian’s Office, General Church Minutes, 1839–1877, April 25,1847 Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

104O’Donovan, “The Mormon Priesthood Ban and Elder Q. Walker Lewis,” 84–86.

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context of a territorial legislature debate over forced labor, Young came outstrongly in favor of slavery and tied his support to the Curse of Cain. Younglent his weight as both territorial leader and Mormonism’s prophet to ensurethat Utah’s territorial constitution allowed the practice of slavery in pursuitof the privileges of statehood.The day before his pronouncement, one of Young’s apostles, Orson Pratt,

opposed legal slavery in Utah and delivered an impassioned speech on thelegislature floor to that effect. Pratt stated the saints should not be willing to“bind the African because he is different from us in color.” Such a disregardfor human life was “enough to cause the angels in heaven to blush.” OrsonPratt believed God had cursed Cain or Ham but that the curse did not passdown to their children, as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had previouslyenumerated.105

Young’s vitriolic response to Orson Pratt followed the logic he and hisapostolic predecessors had established nearly a decade before his speech onthe floor of the Utah territorial legislature. First, Young set out the terms of atheological justification for African slavery. He then changed the subject andpresented a justification for discriminating against people of black Africandescent in Mormon temple liturgy and cosmology. He declared to thelegislature that Cain had becomes jealous of Abel’s favor garnered throughobedience to God. Cain proceeded to murder Abel and received “that markon the face the countenance of every African you ever did see.” Younginformed his audience that Cain’s curse went beyond skin color or otherphysical markers. Cain’s fratricide had represented more than jealousy over asingle offering—the first murder had been an attack on all the children thatAbel would have sired had he been permitted to live. Because their ancestorhad been murdered, Abel’s descendants were not liturgically welded to oneanother through the temple priesthood. Thus, when God cursed Cain, hedeclared that Cain’s descendants (Africans) would not have access to theblessings of the temple priesthood “until the last of [the] posterity of Abelhad received the priesthood until the redemption of earth.” Young thunderedon: “In [the] kingdom of God on earth a man who has the African blood inhim cannot hold one jot nor tittle of priesthood.”106

Young then declared that if anyone believed “the seed of Cain” shouldpartake of “all the [temple priesthood] blessings” God had extended to thoseof the Abrahamic covenant, it signified that God had removed the temple

105LaJean Purcell Carruth, “‘To bind the African because he is different from us in color enoughto cause the angels in heaven to blush’: Orson Pratt’s Opposition to Slavery in the 1852 TerritorialLegislature” (presentation, 49th Mormon History Association, San Antonio, Tex., June 7, 2014).

106BrighamYoung Speech, February 5, 1852, Papers of George D.Watt, MS 4534 box 1 folder 3,Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah;transcribed by LaJean Purcell Carruth, corrected February 26, 2014.




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priesthood from the Mormon Church. This statement suggests that Young wasreferring to excluding all peoples of African descent from the templepriesthood, not merely men of African descent from the ecclesiasticalpriesthood.

Young’s speech affirms what he and other apostles had preached in previousyears. As supposed descendants of Cain, Africans did not have the right totemple ordinances. Young went further with his exegesis of the first biblicalfratricide, declaring Cain had murdered Abel out of jealousy for hisobedience. As a result, Cain and his descendants would be barred from thesealing liturgy, including plural marriage, until all of Abel’s kin had beensealed to him.107 By doing so, Young effectively cut off Africans, whom hebelieved to be Cain’s posterity, from joining the eternal kinship networksmade possible through the temple priesthood of Smith’s sealing liturgy.108

Several historians have framed Young’s racial restriction in terms ofecclesiastical priesthood—because men of African descent were not ordainedto Mormon priesthood office until 1978. However, this label neglects thewomen and children of African descent that Young excluded from templeliturgy, especially the sealing ritual, in his racial exegesis. Although notofficial church policy for more than fifty years, these ecclesiastical andtemple restrictions remained in force within the LDS Church for 126 years.

It is essential to remember Young’s remarks centered on Africans, who werenot considered of the bloodline of Israel, and not those with black skin. Indeed,he declared he had never seen “a white man [or] woman on earth,”acknowledging some humans possessed darker skin but that all descendedfrom the children of Adam.109 For more than a century after Young’s speech,those with African blood could not hold priesthood offices or becomemembers of Mormonism’s eternal kinship network. This seems to suggest aconfusion in Mormonism about whether Young referred to ecclesiastical ortemple priesthood in his 1852 speech, but the absence of new ordinations istelling. Missionary work among peoples of African descent slowed to astandstill. However, Mormons would continue to proselytize among “black-skinned” Pacific Islanders, East Indians, and South Americans because oftheir supposed Israelite blood.

Young’s “fully enunciated position” rejected Joseph Smith’s teaching thatmen would be “punished for their own sins” and not anyone else’s sins or

107Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders abhorred interracial marriage because people ofAfrican descent could not take part in the sealing ordinance or temple priesthood. This meantthat white partners were not permitted to receive the same blessings Mormons associated withsealings. See John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 2012), 223.

108See Stapley, “Women and Mormon Authority,” 104–107.109Brigham Young Speech, February 5, 1852.

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misdeeds.110 However, Young attempted to incorporate Smith’s doctrine ofracial redemption. He taught that after, and only after, Abel’s descendantshad all been sealed to one another, Cain’s progeny could gain access to thesame rituals as Abel’s family. Through this logic, Young could argue that heremained true—eventually—to Smith’s vision of an eternal family of manbound by priesthood rituals and universally free from divine curses of darkskin. Of course, the redemption of Africans would probably come long afterYoung’s death and possibly after the millennium. This strategy echoesJoseph Smith’s 1836 actions in relation to Mormon converts of Africandescent in Missouri. Although both Smith and Young believed in thespiritual and racial redemption of peoples of African descent (albeit withdifferent ideas of when the redemption would take place), they placed thesurvival of their church and their religious and political beliefs before thesalvation and equality of Africans.

IX. CONCLUSION

Mormonism’s racial theology underwent a seismic change between theordination of Elijah Abel and Brigham Young’s speech to the Utah territoriallegislature. Joseph Smith had welcomed converts of all races and skin colorsbecause he believed they possessed the same potential for spirituality andsalvation as whites. Although born outside the covenant of Abraham and thebloodline of Israel, peoples of African descent could be physicallytransformed and become heirs to Abraham, hold ecclesiastical priesthood, andbecome members of Smith’s temple priesthood through conversion andparticipating in Mormon ritual and liturgy. Smith believed that “whiteness,”not merely white skin, was part of an outgrowth of his religious universalismand belief in the perpetuation of the literal blood of Israel and heirship to theAbrahamic covenant. Converts like Elijah Abel and Jane Manning Jameswere expected to patiently wait for a time when peoples of African descentcould govern themselves as a separate but equal people in matters of seculargovernment, but they were permitted to serve in ecclesiastical positions and,perhaps, in temple priesthood. Smith’s racial theology ran counterintuitivelyto contemporary racial beliefs. Although Christians used the Curses of Hamand Cain to justify physical and cultural differences, slavery, and a divineorder of white supremacy, Smith created an answer to the theological problemof race. Curses could be given and taken away by God based on conversion toMormonism. However, Smith’s public statements on race, which came in

110See Karen Lynn Davidson, David J. Whittaker, Richard L. Jensen, and Mark Ashurst-McGee,eds., Histories, Volume 1: Joseph Smith Histories, 1832–1844, The Joseph Smith Papers (Salt LakeCity: Church Historian’s Press, 2012), 500.




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response to political difficulty, did not line up with this doctrine. Thesedisparities reveal the lack of a definite position on Smith’s part by the time ofhis assassination in June 1844, although patriarchal blessings given bySmith’s father and brothers suggest that at least some church leadersunderstood the doctrine.

After William Smith’s excommunication, the belief in racial redemption diedout, and Smith’s followers reverted to standard views of Cain’s Curse andAfrican racial inferiority. When leaders such as Orson Hyde, John Taylor,Parley P. Pratt, and Brigham Young turned to contemporary Protestant viewsof race after his death, they instilled a belief in the eternal inferiority ofblack Africans within Mormon ecclesiology and cosmology. They expressedtheir beliefs with a Mormon twist, such as referring to a premortal life, theright to ecclesiastical priesthood, or membership in the temple priesthood.The religio-racial beliefs of Mormonism after 1852 excluded men, women,and children of African descent from the ecclesiastical and templepriesthoods. Ironically, as white Mormon leaders enacted these measures andasserted their superiority to black Africans, other white Americans came toimagine Latter-day Saints as non-white and worked to temper their politicalparticipation as a result.111

Mormonism’s theological formations of race from 1829 to 1852 interactedwith several of the most prominent themes in the interaction of race andreligion in the antebellum period. The peculiar racial theology and religiousliturgy of Joseph Smith was often at odds with contemporary Protestant andCatholic thought. In an attempt to garner support and protection fromAmericans and the federal government, Brigham Young and otherssupported measures that brought Mormon religio-racial beliefs in harmonywith accepted beliefs and practices. Neither Joseph Smith’s radical vision ofracial redemption and religious equality nor Brigham Young’s more popularexclusivism earned legal protection or religious acceptance for Mormonism.

111Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 140–170.

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