Table Of ContentRace and the Making of
the MoRMon P eoPle
Race and the Making of the
Max P eRRy Muelle R
Mormon People
The univeRsiTy of noRTh caRolina PRess Chapel Hill
© 2017 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Set in Utopia by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America
The University of North Carolina Press has been a
member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Cover illustration: portrait of Jane Manning James by Parry Merkley,
courtesy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; classic arch
with Corinthian column by archideaphoto, iStockphoto.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Mueller, Max Perry, author.
Title: Race and the making of the Mormon people / Max Perry Mueller.
Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2017] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2017005572| isBn 9781469633756 (cloth : alk. paper) |
isBn 9781469636160 (pbk : alk. paper) | isBn 9781469633763 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—History. |
Mormon Church—History. | Book of Mormon. | Race—Religious aspects—
Mormon Church. | Race relations—Religious aspects—Mormon Church. |
Mormon Church—Membership. | Mormons—West (U.S.)
Classification: lcc Bx8611 .M77 2017 | DDc 289.3089—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005572
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Jason Raize R oThenBeRg (1975–2004)
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue. Visions 1
Introduction. Race on the Page, Race on the Body 8
1 The Book of Mormon: A (White) Universal Gospel 31
2 Marketing the Book of Mormon to Noah’s Three Sons 60
3 From Gentile to Israelite 92
4 “Aunt Jane” or Joseph’s Adopted Daughter? 119
5 People Building, on Bodies 153
6 People Building, on Paper 181
Epilogue. Performing Red, Black, and White American 212
Notes 233
Bibliography 293
Index 319
Figures
P.1 Portrait of Joseph Smith Jr., 1843 xiv
P.2 Portrait of Wakara and Arapeen, 1854 4
P.3 Jane Manning James and other pioneers of 1847 6
1.1 Title page of the Book of Mormon, 1830 32
2.1 “Extra,” Evening and the Morning Star (1833) 83
4.1 Jane Manning James at 1847 Pioneer Jubilee 120
5.1 The Territory of Utah, 1855 154
5.2 Solomon Nunes Carvalho, Portrait of Wakara; Later Chief of the
Utah Indians, 1854 157
5.3 Sketch of Walker, Chief of Utah’s, 1852 169
6.1 Thomas Bullock, “Walker’s Writing 1851” 205
6.2 Thomas Bullock’s notation on “Walker’s Writing” 206
E.1 Jane Manning James’s carte- de- visite, ca. 1870 213
E.2 Sally Young Kanosh’s carte- de- visite, 1878 214
E.3 Vilate James’s drawing, ca. 1865 216
E.4 Charles Savage’s photograph of Utes, ca. 1890 222
E.5 Article describing Black Hawk display in LDS
History Museum, 1919 224
E.6 Romney family Christmas photo, December 24, 2013 230
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 is a sprawling living history complex and replication of
a nineteenth- century Mormon pioneer village. It marks the site where on
July 24, 1847, Brigham Young, suffering from the flu, rose from his sickbed
in the back of Wilford Woodruff’s wagon to get his first look at Utah’s Great
Basin. “This is the place,” Woodruff recalled the prophet declaring, where
the Mormons would end their Exodus and build their Zion.
I begin these acknowledgments 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 small group of black Latter- day
Saints as well as the stories of black slaves of white Saints who settled in
Utah in the 1840s and 1850s. I flipped through the compilation and eventu-
ally came across Jane E. Manning James’s autobiography. Entranced, I read
James’s telling—or at least, as I discuss in this book, her telling as recorded
by her white scribe—of her conversion to Mormonism in the 1840s, her trek
from her home in Connecticut to gather with the Saints in Joseph Smith’s
Nauvoo, Illinois, and her experiences as a Mormon pioneer and matriarch
of Utah’s first and most prominent black Mormon family. In that bookshop,
I decided that this story of a black Mormon woman who joined a church in
her youth that welcomed her with, relatively speaking, open arms and that,
by the time she died, was much more ambivalent about her place among
the Saints, was the story that I wanted to tell in my first book.
When I began to dig deeper into this history, I found that there was more
to James’s story than simply the origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints’ antiblack theology and practice. There is much more to
the history of race and Mormonism than declension from racially inclusive
roots to the racial particularism with which the church was long associated.
But I have the next seven chapters to tell that story, so I’ll stick to the task at
hand here and acknowledge the people and institutions that have helped
me tell it!
ix
