Slavery in Zion: A Documentary and Genealogical History of Black Lives and Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847–1862

Slavery in Zion—the juxtaposition of these words presents a raw force of dramatic contrasts. The second two-thirds of her title (“in Zion”) is more expansive and illustrative than the first third (“Slavery”): This is not merely a story of enslavement; this is a story of Black lives and Black experiences within an overwhelmingly Anglo- and Nordic-American context. Many years have passed since Amy Tanner Thiriot reviewed my own work that dealt, in a much more limited way, with similar topic material. Both then and now, we agreed in part and disagreed in part. Today, it is clear that with her work, Thiriot has performed a profound service to all who have even a passing interest in the study of the American West. More than any other to date, she offers a rich, piece-by-piece reconstruction of enslaved Black lives in Utah.Scholarship develops in response to common wisdom and conventional narratives; authors write books to challenge harmful, if popularly believed, narratives or, alternatively, to relieve historical actors from the unbearable weight of extraordinary complicity. Thiriot avoids both extremities. She seeks to reconstruct a Big History from small numbers; her work is not only a narrative history but also a biographical dictionary, as well as a tranche of transcribed, hard-to-find primary source documents. Inconvenient as it may be, this history reveals a great deal about the awkward legal and cultural spaces territorial Utah inhabited in the national issues of race and enslavement. Utah was a slave territory—or was it?Utah occupied a legally and culturally ambiguous place in America's grapple with race and slavery, and this ambiguity forms an axis of Slavery in Zion. Verbiage is important. Thiriot highlights how the language of “slave” versus “servant” could be slippery, particularly in common parlance. Whatever word enslavers wished to use, slave is as slave does. Utah Territory was a legally ambiguous space for enslavement between the Latter-day Saints’ arrival in 1847 and 1852, when Utah's legislature passed the famous “Act in Relation to Service.” This act was an effort, in part, to blunt the effects of the typical slave code in Southern states. Utah's code allowed for slave manumission (i.e., the individual release of the enslaved from bonds of service), an improvement over the laws of most Southern states. Yet, the realities of enslavement come through quantitatively: When church authorities enjoined the Saints to provide symbolic deeds of transfer showing they were willing to contribute their property to the church, enslaved Black people show up on the documentation, with dollar amounts attached.To the general dismay of legislators such as Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff, the act failed to protect enslaved Black people from sales. Perceptive observers, such as legislator Orson Pratt, condemned the law for countenancing enslavement by another name in the first instance. In fact, the law was, like the United States Constitution itself, a legally ambivalent document—both allowing for and mitigating against enslavement. In this volume, Brigham Young plays the part of a recurring guest actor, not a protagonist. Thiriot demonstrates that Young was averse to enslavement and the slave trade. Biblical though he considered it to be, he and others thought it all a sordid business from which the Saints should keep their hands clean. At times, Young's practical nature comes through, demonstrating a keen ability to deflect and manipulate those seeking to establish slave ownership.Her title highlights a diversity of relationships Black people in Utah enjoyed, suffered, and endured. They include Ellen James (daughter of the famed Jane Manning James), who was pushed into the sex trade in Eureka, Nevada; and Thomas Bankhead Colburn/Coleman (the name differs in the accounts), who served as a rescuer in the Willie and Martin rescue expedition, murdered a man over a love interest, and was himself murdered over an interracial sexual liaison. Thiriot positions the lore about Green Flake being a “tithing payment” to the church as an instance of contract labor for which his enslaver, Agnes Flake, derived a profit. At the same time, Flake was renowned for his public positioning and posture; so notable was it that one observer compared him to a United States Military Academy cadet, a notable compliment in a time not long after the graduation of the Academy's first Black cadet.The isolation of the Mormon people makes it tempting, if historically and morally misguided, to alienate enslaved Black Utahns from the broader experience of the enslaved. Thiriot rightly contends that this temptation must be resisted, for many of the enslaved Black people of Utah bore the same kinds of scars on their backs from the whip's lash, the same memories of sale and family alienation, and the same strength to navigate delicate legal situations. The enslaved Black people of Utah's early history deserve a particular portion at the table of collective memory; not only do they illuminate the near-mythological narratives of Utah's “pioneer forebearers,” they illuminate Utah's share in a national discussion that virtually all Utah leadership badly hoped to avoid.As with most works, some areas could be improved. This work is a targeted history—granular and particular. It would have been helpful for the book to engage with the role of enslavement in Utah's strategic placement in the antebellum United States. Thiriot documents, as is well known, the small number of enslaved Black Americans in Utah, totaling approximately one hundred; to that end, she might have teased the “why” thread out more, connecting its minuscule status to Young's designs to preserve Utah as a territory largely free of Black people. Whether as a strategic decision to keep its distance from enslavement or to preserve Utah Territory's essential Anglo-Saxon quality (or both), the outcome was an extraordinarily small population of enslaved Black people.The granular work of reconstructing Black lives requires nuts-and-bolts work, and Thiriot excels in resurrecting the historical memory of people whom high-level officials would have preferred erased from public memory. Thiriot's work ought to be read broadly and deeply. Her work is a rich overture to the multifaceted and nuanced lives of Black Utahns in the American West.1