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Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 1830-1880 Black, White, and Red: Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 1830-1880 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Mueller, Max Perry. 2015. Black, White, and Red: Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 1830-1880. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17463965 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Black, White, and Red: Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 1830-1880 A dissertation presented by Max Perry Mueller to The Committee on the Study of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of The Study of Religion Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts September 2014 © 2014, Max Perry Mueller All rights reserved. Advisors: David Neil Hempton and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Max Perry Mueller Black, White, and Red: Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 1830-1880 Abstract This dissertation uses the histories and doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) as case studies to consider how nineteenth-century Americans turned to religion to solve the early American republic’s “race problem.” I begin by approaching Mormonism’s foundational text, the Book of Mormon, as the earliest Latter-day Saints did: as a radical new lens to view the racialized populations—Americans of European, African and Native American descent (“white,” “black,” “red”)—that dominated the antebellum American cultural landscape in which the church was founded in 1830. Early Mormons believed themselves called to end all schisms, including racial ones, within the Body of Christ as well as the political body of the American republic. However, early Mormon leaders were not racial egalitarians. Their vision consisted not of racial pluralism, but of the redemptive “whitening” of all peoples. Whiteness—both as a signifier and even phenotype—became an aspirational racial identity that non-whites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. As the church failed to become the prophesied panacea for American racial and religious divisions, its theology evolved to view race as fixed. Black and Mormon became mutually exclusive identities. And though based on Book of Mormon theology, the Mormons held out hope for mass Indian redemption, it was forestalled as the church focused on shaping white converts into respectable Mormons. However, this history is not simply one of declension. Instead, the church’s evolving view on race arose out of the persistent dialectal tension between the two central, and seemingly paradoxical, elements of the Mormon people’s identity: a missionary people divinely called to teach the gospel to everyone everywhere, and a racially particularistic people who believe that God has, at times, favored certain racial groups over others. As Mormon identity became more racially particularistic, white iii Mormons began to marginalize non-whites in the “Mormon archive”— which I conceptualize as the written and oral texts that compose the Mormon people’s collective memory. However, a handful of black and Native Americans wrote themselves into this archive, claiming their place among the prophets and pioneers that mark membership in Mormon history. They understood that literacy signified authority, and thus with their own narratives, they wrote against what they believed was the marginalization of their historical subjectivity. iv Table of Contents List of Figures vi Citation Abbreviations vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 Part I Chapter One: The Book of Mormon: A “(White)Universal Gospel” 32 Chapter Two: “Samuel, the Lamanite” and the Race of the Archive 58 Part II Chapter Three: Marketing the Book of Mormon to Noah’s Three Sons 82 Chapter Four: From Gentile to Israelite 130 Chapter Five: “Aunt Jane” or Joseph’s Daughter? 179 Part III Chapter Six: People Building, on Bodies 230 Chapter Seven: People Building, on Paper 259 Epilogue 295 Bibliography 319 v List of Figures 3:1 E.B. Grandin’s Print Shop, Palmyra, New York. 82 3:2 “Extra,” Evening & Morning Star (1833) 116 5:1 Jane Manning James, Pioneer Jubilee Photograph (1897) 180 6:1 The Territory of Utah (1855) 230 6:2 Walkara, Ute Chief (1854) 233 7:1 Walker’s Writing (1851) 288 7:2 Thomas Bullock’s notation on Walker’s Writing 289 8:1 Jane Manning James’s Carte de Visite (ca. 1870) 295 8:2 Sally Young Kanosh’s Carte de Visite (1878) 296 8:3 Vilate James’s Drawing (ca. 1865) 298 8:4 Charles Savage’s Photograph of Utes (ca. 1890) 304 8:5 Black Hawk Display in LDS History Museum (1919) 306 8:6 Romney Family Christmas Photo (2013) 315 vi Citation Abbreviations BofM Joseph Smith Jr., The Book of Mormon [first edition]. Palmyra, NY: E. B. Grandin, 1830. Note: When citing the first edition of the Book of Mormon, I provide the page number of that edition, followed by the related 1981 edition’s book, chapter, and verse (e.g. BofM, 22 [1 Nephi 15:17). BYSC L. Tom Perry Special Collections. Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. BYP Brigham Young Papers, CR 1234 1. Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah. CHL Church History Library. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah. D&C The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Containing Revelations Given to Joseph Smith, the Prophet, with Some Additions by His Successors in the Presidency of the Church. Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981. Note: When citing earlier editions of D&C, I indicate the year of publication and section of that edition, followed by the related 1981 D&C Section and verse (e.g. D&C (1835) Section XVIII [D&C 57: 1-4]). DHC History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ed. B H. Roberts. Vols. I-VII. Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1902-1932. E&MS Evening & Morning Star. Independence, Missouri, June 1832-July 1833; Kirtland, Ohio, December 1833-September 1834. EPB Early Patriarchal Blessings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ed. H. Michael Marquardt. Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2007. FHL Family History Library. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah. GCM General Church Minutes, CR 100 318. Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah. JD Journal of Discourses by Brigham Young, His Two Counsellors, the Twelve Apostles and Others. Vols. I-XXVI. Liverpool and London: various publishers, 1854-1886. vii JSH (Vol.1) Histories, 1832-1844. eds. Karen Lynn Davidson, David J. Wittaker, Richard L. Jensen, and Mark Ashurst-McGee. Vol. 1 of the Histories series of The Joseph Smith Papers, edited by Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, Richard L. Bushman. Salt Lake City: The Church Historian’s Press, 2012. JSPP Joseph Smith Paper Project. Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. http://josephsmithpapers.org/. LPB Later Patriarchal Blessings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ed. H. Michael Marquardt. Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2012. M&A Latter-day Saints’ Messenger & Advocate. Manchester, England, May 1840-March 1842; Liverpool, April 1842-March 3, 1932; London, March 10, 1932-December 1970. MS Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star. Manchester, England, May 1840-March 1842; Liverpool, April 1842-March 3, 1932; London, March 10, 1932-December 1970. RT (Vol. 1) Revelations and Translations, Volume 1: Manuscript Revelation Books. eds. Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Woodford, and Steven C. Harper. Vol. 1 of the Revelations and Translations series of The Joseph Smith Papers, edited by Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, Richard L. Bushman. Salt Lake City: The Church Historian’s Press, 2011. RT (Vol. 2) Revelations and Translations Volume 2: Published Revelations. eds. Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Woodford, and Steven C. Harper. Vol. 2 of the Revelations and Translations series of The Joseph Smith Papers, edited by Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, Richard L. Bushman. Salt Lake City: The Church Historian’s Press, 2011. T&S Times & Seasons. Commerce/Nauvoo, Illinois, November 1839-Febrauary 1846. UUSC Special Collections. J. Willard Marriot Library, University of Utah. Salt Lake City, Utah. viii Acknowledgments On our honeymoon in 2009, I dragged my wife Anna to “This Is The Place Heritage Park,” located in Emigration Canyon overlooking Salt Lake City. The park, a sprawling “living history” complex and replication of a nineteenth-century Mormon pioneer village, marks the site where on July 24, 1847, Brigham Young purportedly rose from his sickbed in the back of Wilford Woodruff’s wagon to get his first look at the Great Basin. “This is the place,” Woodruff recalled the prophet declaring, where the Saints would end their Exodus and begin to build their Zion. I begin these acknowledgements where I will end them—thanking my wife, and in this case begging her forgiveness for turning our honeymoon into a research trip. But our afternoon at This Is the Place was fruitful, at least for my own scholarship. In the bookshop, I came across Kate B. Carter’s Story of the Negro Pioneer (1965), which contains a collection of first and secondhand stories about the handful of black Saints as well as the stories of the more abundant black slaves of white Saints who settled in Utah in the 1840s and 1850s.
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