This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum UtahThis Abominable Slavery

It is rare that authors writing Western United States history can draw upon previously unknown sources. That is the case, however, in a new book from Oxford University Press, This Abominable Slavery. The authors use Pitman shorthand reports of debates in the 1852 Utah territorial legislature. The reports sat unused and untranslated in the archives for more than one hundred and fifty years, but they now center the story of the legal history of slavery and unfree labor in Utah Territory. Each of the three coauthors brought specific expertise to this project: Paul Reeve brought his understanding of the history of Utah, Christopher Rich brought his knowledge of legal theory and history, and LaJean Carruth brought a rare ability to decipher Pitman shorthand.With this new work, Reeve, Rich, and Carruth closed the last major gap in the history of unfree labor in the Western United States. Other recent contributions are from Stacey L. Smith about unfree labor in California in Freedom's Frontier (2015), Andrés Reséndez about Native American slavery in The Other Slavery (2016), William S. Kiser about the struggle over unfree labor in New Mexico Territory in Borderlands of Slavery (2017), Kevin Waite about the attempt by Southerners to expand slavery westward in West of Slavery (2021), and Amy Tanner Thiriot about the experience of Black Americans in slavery in Utah Territory in Slavery in Zion (2023).Although Brigham Young and other Latter-day Saint leaders preferred to keep matters of slavery quiet to avoid endangering Utah's status as a territory, the leaders decided that the confluence of Native American and Black American slavery in the territory required them to act. During the 1852 legislative session, they debated unfree labor, with Orson Pratt registering strong dissent to anything resembling slavery. The legislature passed laws regulating unfree labor, including the legislation called “An Act in Relation to Service.” The authors stated that it “is probably the most ambiguous law concerning slavery to be enacted” in the US West (120). The authors argue that the act regulated both African American labor and European labor, including debts owed by recipients of the Perpetual Emigrating Fund, a Latter-day Saint fund to help European converts move to the United States.Brigham Young's speeches during the 1852 legislative session also began a long-standing practice in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to deny temple rituals and the lay priesthood to most people of African descent. These restrictions were in effect for more than one hundred and twenty years, bringing outsize interest to what might otherwise be considered obscure legislation for scholars of US religious history.Since readers may have limited understanding of the types of unfree labor used throughout US history, the book explains first why questions arose about unfree labor in Utah Territory, then pauses to summarize the history of unfree labor in antebellum America. Before the Civil War, legal systems encompassed both indenture, the control of another person's labor, and slavery, the ownership of people from birth to death as chattel (movable) property. The laws governing unfree labor changed as Americans grappled with the needs of growing economies and the tensions between liberty and property rights. As the Pitman shorthand accounts of the legislative debates reveal, these historical tensions showed up in Utah as some settlers participated in both Black and Native American slavery. The main figures in the debate were Brigham Young, who decided he needed to address the issue and justify his decisions on religious grounds, and Orson Pratt, an abolitionist who believed not only that liberty prevented holding people or their labor as property, but that Black men deserved voting rights.A new online resource hosted by the Marriott Library at the University of Utah accompanies the book. In addition to a survey of the history, it provides a collection of source materials including debates, legislation, newspaper articles, and legal documents. The website highlights historians’ increasing ability to correct public history and promulgate fact-based narratives about the past.Although the book and website primarily document a local dispute in a remote desert territory, mostly kept from the outside world, its content is of interest not only to those concerned with Utah history but also to a much wider audience. It helps complete a recent series of books about how unfree labor helped build the US West, and how and why the different forms of labor endured. The book describes how legal theories about unfree labor and ideals about liberty and bondage became a microcosm of the national debates. It shows how the debates resulted in a long-standing religious practice of segregated worship that, unlike the original debates, played out on an international stage. This comprehensive work from Reeve, Rich, and Carruth enriches our understanding not only of Utah and Western history but also highlights the importance of historical scholarship in illuminating issues of freedom and justice.