Mormon Missionaries in Jamaica

On the morning of Saturday, January 15, 1853, Aaron Farr and Darwin Richardson arrived at the reception room of Jamaica's Attorney General, Dowell O'Reilly, to “inquir[e] our duties with regards to Procureing Liscenses for Preaching the gospel in this Island.” Meanwhile, their fellow missionaries, Jesse Turpin and A. B. Lambson, “went to see the mayor” with the same objective. The elders had arrived on the island just five days earlier. Although assured that “ther[e] was free toleration to all se[c]ts of religion” in Jamaica, their initial experience suggested otherwise.Footnote ¹²

After arriving in Kingston Harbour on the evening of January 9, the four missionaries disembarked from the Brig Harriet Ann the next morning and spent the day “walk[ing] through the city” and then “out to the Subburbs.” Although neither the state of the city nor the climate struck them as particularly favorable—Aaron Farr noted the “excessive heat” and complained that “the city looks like it was going to rack”—the four elders arrived in “good health and Spirits.” During their first three days in the city, they secured a room to rent, met several prominent Kingston residents, and “mad[e] a Publick announcement . . . in the Best Paper in the city” for their first public lecture, to be held in Polytechnic Hall, an educational exhibition space operated by Jewish entrepreneur William Clunes.Footnote ¹³ The morning edition of the Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch for Thursday, January 13, announced that the four missionaries had recently arrived “direct from Great Salt Lake City, Utah Territory, U.S.” and “intend giving a lecture on the ‘Principles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’” that evening.Footnote ¹⁴

When the elders arrived at the hall, they found a large throng of people outside—Aaron Farr later estimated that the assembled crowd numbered 150. An anxious Clunes invited them in, but then, unexpectedly, he “barred the door and said the people should not come in,” explaining that “the Mayor told him he . . . had not been consulted on the subject and that no Preaching or lectureing could be allowed in his hall.” The missionaries’ protests failed to convince Clunes otherwise, whose anxiety increased as the crowd outside grew and demanded to be let in. While some of the assembled crowd was there to hear the elders, “hundreds” more crowded round to protest the presence of those they deemed “Phanaticks and Poligamists.” Fearing that the assembly was on the verge of becoming a riot, Clunes ushered the elders out of the building “by a secrat back way.”Footnote ¹⁵ It was an inauspicious beginning to Mormonism in the Caribbean.

The meetings with Mayor Hector Mitchell and Attorney General Dowell O'Reilly two days later only added to the missionaries’ frustrations. Mayor Mitchell “informed Br Turpin he would not give any toleration or protection whatever” to the group, while O'Reilly, upon learning that the visitors in his reception room were Latter-day Saints, refused to talk to the missionaries at all. Later that day, elders Turpin and Lambson encountered O'Reilly “in the street” and introduced themselves. Turpin extended his hand and requested the attorney general's “Permission to Preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” O'Reilly indignantly “snached back his hand,” told the missionaries he had “already been Bothered by some of your party this morning,” and walked away.Footnote ¹⁶

Turned away by city officials, the missionaries took their case elsewhere, appealing to both the public and higher-ranking colonial officials. With the aid of attorney Wemyss Anderson, the missionaries convinced newspaper editor Henry Samuels to publish “the credentials of the four Mormon Missionaries lately arrived” and secured an appointment with Robert Monroe Harrison, William Henry Harrison's cousin and the longstanding American consul to Jamaica.Footnote ¹⁷ After hearing the missionaries’ reports of their meetings with Mayor Mitchel and Attorney General O'Reilly, Harrison patiently listened to the Mormons’ “long talk . . . uppon the principals of the doctrines of the Latter day saints & its history.” According to Farr, he “seemed verry well pleased with us” and offered to “write a sympathetick letter to the Governor reckommending us as Gentlemen [and] informing him of the treatment we had received from the official Authorities in this place.”Footnote ¹⁸ With a letter of recommendation from the American Consul in hand, Jesse Turpin and Aaron Farr “took the cours[e] to Spanish Town,” where they were received by Governor Charles Edward Grey and the Executive and Legislative Council of the island. To the missionaries’ great relief, the council granted them permission to preach at the Spanish Town Court House and sent the missionaries back to Kingston with a letter informing Harrison that “His Excellency is not aware of any objection to their having peaceable meetings and delivering the public lectures which they propose.”Footnote ¹⁹

Having legal permission to preach, however, did not automatically translate into a willingness on the part of Jamaicans to hear the missionaries’ message. So far, the elders had only found two potential venues for their preaching, and neither, it turned out, was as available as they had hoped. When Darwin Richardson arrived at the Spanish Town Court House for a scheduled preaching appointment, he was turned away. “The council would not give the court house,” evidently bowing to public pressure.Footnote ²⁰ In Kingston, Clunes was hesitant to rent out his hall again. In a letter published in the Colonial Standard on January 19, Clunes noted that “the Mormons are quite the engrossing subject at present” and cited several requests “to allow them to be heard” in his “public Lecture room.”Footnote ²¹

Clunes remained worried, however, that a similar scene would transpire as had the first time he opened his hall to the elders. “I would ask,” he demanded, “who would remunerate me for any damage done to my premises by a rude and lawless mob as exists in this city[?]” He accused his fellow Kingstonians of not being the best hosts, noting “how difficult it is frequently for me to keep order, even to hear their brother citizens, much less strangers of whom they have a pre conceived bad opinion.” Clunes decried their reliance on unfair and biased publications in judging the missionaries and their quickness “to enter into debate” before hearing them out. While offering a tepid defense of the Latter-day Saints, Clunes also assured the public that he would never “allow any immoral subject to be brought forward” on his premises.Footnote ²² The missionaries never again preached in the Polytechnic Hall. Nor did they spend much more time in Kingston or Spanish Town, opting instead to “exit to the country” and try their luck in the mountainous Jamaican interior.Footnote ²³

On January 21, 1853, Alfred Lambson and Jesse Turpin departed for Spanish Town. Darwin Richardson and Aaron Farr “wen[t] another direction to the East side of the island.” The initial reception of those they encountered in the island's mountainous interior proved to be much the same as in Kingston. The missionaries were turned away from several estates as well as “a Publick house [for] Black people.” After a Protestant missionary from the United States finally showed compassion on the tired and hungry elders and agreed to feed them lunch, he proceeded to spend the meal detailing “an expose to our doctrin[e]” he had recently heard from another preacher, letting the missionaries know that “he had a verry poor opinion of us.”Footnote ²⁴ Not everyone, however, was antagonistic to the elders. At Temple Hall, a once expansive sugar plantation, Farr and Richardson were welcomed by a “Mr Leary[,] who received us kindly for th[e] night & fed us . . . the firs[t] meals of victuals since we been in Jamaica.” The following day, they arrived at the home of a “Mrs Kay” on a coffee plantation called Salisbury Plain. An elderly white widow, Eliza Kay welcomed the elders, fed them, and agreed to allow the missionaries to “con[v]ers[e] with the household uppon the principals of salvation.” Shortly after their arrival, however, “there came a letter from Kingston.” A. B. Lambson had written to alert the elders to the arrival of two additional Mormon missionaries. Leaving Richardson behind to continue teaching Eliza Kay and family, Aaron Farr set off for Kingston once more.Footnote ²⁵

Shortly after Farr and Richardson had set out to St. Andrew, James Brown and Elijah Thomas, called at the August conference to labor in British Guiana, had stopped off in Kingston en route to their intended destination. “We went on shore,” wrote Brown in a letter to Brigham Young, “and to our grate Joy we found” the other elders.Footnote ²⁶ The missionaries must have been delighted to see Brown and Thomas, too. At fifty-one years old, Brown was a full decade older than any of the others. He was also a veteran missionary and experienced leader.Footnote ²⁷ As the five elders sat in council “in relation to what Corse we should take,” they came up with a new plan of action: “Br. Lambson and Turpin [would] go to Verbadoes Island,” accompanied by Brown and Thomas, who would then continue on to Guiana. Farr and Richardson, meanwhile, would remain in Jamaica and continue teaching Eliza Kay and any other interested parties. But after Farr set out on his return trip to Salisbury Plain, Brown experienced “a vision” in which he and Thomas “started out in the Cuntry,” a message he understood as instruction to remain in Jamaica. Heeding the call from the experienced elder, the four remaining missionaries divided up the island, each taking charge of a region. “Elder Thomas and Turpin went North West,” wrote Brown, and “Lambson and I went Northeast,” leaving Farr and Richardson to take St. Ann's Bay and Dry Harbour on Jamaica's northern coast.Footnote ²⁸

Upon returning to the home of the white widow Eliza Kay, Farr was pleased to discover that she “and her two Grandsons” were receptive to Darwin Richardson's overtures. “We labored with them a few days,” reported Farr. Soon, “they received our testimony and obeyed the Gospel.”Footnote ²⁹ On the evening of January 23, Darwin Richardson dreamed “he was walking out and came to an old yard . . . which was covered with all kinds of rubbish and straw,” in the center of which “Stood a few shieves or oats which ware very green.” He dreamt that the field burst into flames, burning “all the rubbish” but leaving “the Oats . . . only Scorched a little.” The following day, Farr and Richardson “asked the People of the house if they wished Baptism.” To the missionaries’ great delight, “the[y] said they Believe what We had told them was true and was ready to go into the water.” On January 25, the elders “repaired to the Water,” where “Br Richardson officiated in the ordinance of Baptism” for Eliza Kay, Joseph Piercy Smith, and Frederick John Smith. To Richardson, it was a fulfillment of his dream. As they emerged from the water, he “remarked that those ware the shieves of Oats.” God's judgment was coming to scorch Jamaica, but at least a few righteous remnants remained.Footnote ³⁰ That evening, the three were confirmed as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the first Mormon converts in Jamaica. Still fearful that there were not “verry many Good People in the Island,” the elders continued their mission with renewed hope.Footnote ³¹

Traveling north to St. Ann's Bay, they found lodging and occasional meals but little interest in their message. Continuing west, Farr and Richardson set out for Falmouth, traveling “up the co[a]st through mud and rain.” As the missionaries ventured farther into the mountains of northern Jamaica, their exhaustion and sense of isolation grew. When they could not arrange other lodgings, they slept in “an old abandoned castle” and subsisted on whatever food they could scrounge up. Although they “felt the Preserving Power of God attending us,” it nevertheless came as something of a relief when “the Spirit told” Farr “to stop” and retrace “our course South.” With their “feet verry Sore and blistered” and “without rest or sleep,” the pair “continued our journey on thru the night,” walking some sixty-two miles before reaching Spanish Town and taking the train from there to Kingston.Footnote ³²

Upon returning to their rented room, the elders were surprised to find “Brthr Brown & Lambson.” James Brown was bedridden with “a raging fever” and on the verge of death.Footnote ³³ Alfred Lambson had also contracted Yellow Fever but recovered enough just in time to assume care for his friend. The pair related to Farr and Richardson that Elijah Thomas and Jesse Turpin were also still in Jamaica. After Farr had returned to the home of Eliza Kay two weeks earlier, the remaining missionaries had ventured out to preach, but without any success. Brown reported being “turned out of dores” and charged the island's clergy of conspiring against the missionaries.Footnote ³⁴ Returning to the plan agreed upon at their January 21 meeting, Brown, Lambson, Thomas, and Turpin had attempted to sail to Barbados but were prevented by an antagonistic shipping agent. After the elders had purchased their tickets and boarded the brig with their belongings, the agent “came on board and ordered them Mormons and their Efects put on Shore,” refusing them passage “to any of the English Islands” or in “any English vessel.” After meeting again with the U.S. Consul, Robert Harrison, the missionaries deemed it the wisest and safest course to return to the United States. Once Elijah Thomas and Jesse Turpin returned to Kingston a few short days later, they did just that. On February 10, 1853, five of the six Mormon missionaries “gathered up our effects and went on Board the Steam Ship Ohio,” bound for New York City. Darwin Richardson remained behind, with plans to travel once more to Salisbury Plain and there ordain Joseph and Frederick Smith to the Latter-day Saint priesthood in an effort to leave behind some semblance of church organization before securing his own passage on the next available ship to North America. Richardson ended up remaining in Jamaica for another two months. In addition to ordaining the Smith brothers, he baptized and confirmed Richard Hollywood, an aging and infirm blacksmith from whom the elders had rented their room. On April 10, Richardson boarded the Brig Caroline, setting sail not for the United States but Liverpool, England. His departure marked the end of the short-lived Mormon mission to Jamaica.Footnote ³⁵ Missionaries would not return until 1979.

The Politics of Polygamy in a Former Slave Society

In a letter to the editor of the Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch, William Clunes defended his invitation to the Mormon elders to preach in his hall, but he took care to assure the Jamaican public that no “immoral subject” would be preached. The unspoken immorality he feared was polygamy, the subject that shaped most reactions to Latter-day Saints and their message throughout the world in the 1850s. In Jamaica, public officials and preachers in both city and countryside alike raised concerns about the arrival of the missionaries.

Spreading the doctrine of what Mormons called “celestial marriage” was central to the missions launched in 1852. The agenda of the special conference held in Salt Lake City on August 28 and 29, 1852, centered around two items: the expansion of the church's missionary reach and the public announcement of polygamy. The first day of the conference was focused on the calling of more than one hundred missionaries to regions around the world, including the West Indies. The several sermons preached and songs sung that day each spoke to the duty of those “elders chosen to go to the four quarters of the globe to transact business [and] preach the gospel.” The second day of the conference shifted attention to another matter. The published minutes in the Deseret News note simply that “Elder Orson Pratt preached on the subject of marriage,” followed by the administration of the Lord's Supper and a sermon from Brigham Young “concerning the opening up of the last gospel dispensation, doctrine and ordinances of the gospel, modern revelation, &c.” The meeting concluded by the reading of the great “‘Revelation, given to Joseph Smith, Nauvoo, July 12 1843,’ on marriage.”Footnote ³⁶ Although the official record was sparse, its significance was immense.

What those brief minutes left unsaid is the exact content of Pratt's sermon on marriage. As Patty Sessions noted in her diary after attending the conference that day, “Orson Pratt preached on the plurality of wives the first that it has been made public.” The 1843 revelation read to the congregation was the previously private divine mandate to Joseph Smith concerning “the principle and doctrin[e] of . . . having many wives.” Polygamy, the revelation insisted, was “a new and an everlasting covenant” necessary for the salvation of all commanded to participate. “If ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned,” it ominously declared.Footnote ³⁷ Although dictated by Joseph Smith to his scribes in 1843, the revelation actually codified a system of polygamous relationships Smith secretly initiated at least as early as 1841. Prior to his death in 1844, Smith had married more than thirty women and invited a small group of his most devout followers to also take additional wives. The practice was continued and expanded by Brigham Young after Smith's death. By the time of Pratt's announcement in 1852, it was a well-known secret in and out of church circles and attracted criticism and contempt from scandalized Americans. Now, Latter-day Saint missionaries were to begin publicly preaching the controversial doctrine.Footnote ³⁸

The reactions from those missionaries tasked with preaching polygamy in 1852 were mixed. Some, like Hosea Stout, who had been assigned to preach in Hong Kong, were excited. Stout, who had married three additional women after the death of his first wife in 1839, relished the opportunity to “publickly declare the true and greatest principle of our holy religion.” Others, including the majority of those called who had not married more than one woman, were undoubtedly less enthusiastic.Footnote ³⁹ Two of the four elders sent to Jamaica—Alfred Lambson and Jesse Turpin—were married to multiple women. The other two—Aaron Farr and Darwin Richardson—only had one wife each.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although he later married two additional wives, Farr believed plural marriage to be “a Minor consideration” in the broader scope of gospel teachings. Upon returning to the United States, he grew weary of converts in Connecticut and Pennsylvania repeatedly asking “how many Wives a . . . Smart Man would be allowd in the G.S.L. Valley.”

William Clunes's letter confirms that the missionaries were not quite as enthusiastic (or were at least more circumspect) about preaching polygamy as some of their colleagues sent elsewhere. According to Clunes, “the ‘Mormonites’ here at present, . . . seem to be as much disgusted with the principles, said to be theirs, as advertised in the newspapers, as the reader may or can be.”Footnote ⁴¹ Whether the missionaries’ reluctance to emphasize polygamy in their preaching was a strategic choice meant to minimize persecution or a sincere expression of their personal views, the decision was likely a smart one. Wherever Mormon missionaries went in the nineteenth century, rumors of their polygamous harems interfered with their ability to preach. In Jamaica, polygamy was a particularly fraught subject.

The elders carried with them tools at their disposal. Each of the missionaries sent to “preach the gospel to all nations” in 1852 left equipped with a printed edition of Orson Pratt's sermon on “celestial marriage” and a copy of Joseph Smith's 1843 revelation to use in introducing the subject to audiences around the world.Footnote ⁴² It turned out that the inhabitants of most places they went had already heard the news. American and British newspapers picked up the story almost immediately after its August announcement, and local papers throughout the British Empire reprinted those reports. The news of Pratt's announcement sent shockwaves throughout Victorian England. By embracing polygamy, Mormonism represented a threat not only to Britain's religious order but also its social order, lending anti-Mormonism, according to one historian, “a crusading zeal.” Politicians, preachers, and the broader public all took up “the cause of public morality against the Mormon threat.”Footnote ⁴³ Protestant ministers and newspaper editors in Jamaica echoed their counterparts in the metropole. As Aaron Farr later recalled, “no sooner had we landed [in Jamaica] than the Priests began to howl Impostures, Polygamists, and Scamps.” They called “Old Joe Smith” a “Modern Mahomet” and charged Farr and his companions with preaching “Bigamy.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In Jamaica, opposition to Mormonism as a threat to the island's moral order occurred against the backdrop of more than a century of efforts by abolitionists, missionaries, and reformers to police the sexual and family lives of black Jamaicans.Footnote ⁴⁵ It also came on the heels of a controversy surrounding an American missionary on the island preaching “spiritual wifery” that threatened to undermine Protestant missions on the island.

White Jamaicans had long taken an active interest in the sexual activities and relationships of those held in bondage. Both the sexual violence inflicted on enslaved women by slave owners and overseers and the efforts of missionaries and reformers to suppress licentiousness were conditioned on a belief in an inherent African promiscuity, itself a manifestation of the slaves’ supposed savagery. Polygamy, in the minds of many white reformers, was the ultimate embodiment of that sexual depravity.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society's instructions to those sent to the Caribbean implored them to prevent black converts from “relaps[ing] into [their] former habits, and becom[ing] a polygamist, an adulterer, or an unclean person.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Such efforts continued in the years following emancipation.

Indeed, the liberation of millions of enslaved individuals lent a renewed sense of urgency to the cause. Christianity, monogamy, and industry were to be the linchpins of a new social order ushered in by emancipation in the 1830s, and Protestant missionaries imagined themselves at its head. An 1842 author rejoiced at the “rapid progress . . . in civilization” he observed in Jamaica, noting as evidence that “polygamy became rare” and newly married “parents who had but lately lived an heathen life” now “constantly brought their children to the baptismal font.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Many black Christians in Jamaica joined in these efforts, sensing not only an opportunity to spread gospel teachings but also a chance to demonstrate that they were capable of living morally and spiritually upright lives. Black Baptist ministers advocated a respectability politics in an effort to assert their independence from white oversight, taking advantage of the white missionaries’ moral crusade in an attempt to advance ecclesiastical autonomy.

Protestant missionaries’ efforts, however, focused not only on rooting out African polygamy. They also took aim at the “African unions” arranged by planters “as a tool of social control” during slavery, as well as the rape of enslaved women and girls that had produced “a different pattern of family values” in which concubinage and polygamy were seen as virtues for the planting class.Footnote ⁴⁹ Slavery, these missionaries believed, had corrupted all involved, creating a licentious society in desperate need of their civilizing Christian influence. It came as quite a shock, then, when leaders of the American Missionary Association (AMA) learned that one of their own was guilty of equally disgraceful immorality.

In the years immediately preceding the arrival of Mormon missionaries to Jamaica, reports of a scandal emerged among representatives from the AMA. Between 1849 and 1852, a small group led by missionary John Hyde embraced antinomianism, claimed revelation from God, and launched an assault on Christian institutions, including the missionary enterprise and marriage. What began as doctrinal disagreement turned into a scandal involving illicit affairs, shared baths, and “entirely naked” group swimming parties. John Hyde began having “illicit intercourse with Mrs. Evarts,” while Urania Hunt declared that “she felt free . . . to enjoy sexual intercourse with any man who had the same liberty with herself” and that such relations were “approved of God.” The AMA removed the Hydeites from their ministerial positions and evicted them from mission property, but the scandal threatened the moral authority of the organization. Not only did Hyde and his followers embrace alternative sexual and familial arrangements, but they also leveled a devastating critique of the control white missionaries continued to exert over black Jamaicans.Footnote ⁵⁰

In December 1852, John Hyde's “spiritual wife,” Lucy Evarts, gave birth to their child. Less than one month later, the Mormon missionaries arrived in Kingston. Two days after their arrival, the elders “visit[ed] a Local Minister by the name of Beardsley,” who invited them to his preaching service that day and allowed them to announce their own meeting the following evening.Footnote ⁵¹ Julius Beardslee had first come to Jamaica in 1839 as a recent graduate of Oberlin College, the first crop of abolitionist-minded missionaries representing the AMA. In 1846, he accepted a position at the Mico Institute in Kingston but remained active in AMA affairs. In 1849, he was one of the first to report the “wild . . . religious views” of John Hyde to mission authorities in America.Footnote ⁵² If he had known that the Mormon elders planned to preach polygamy, he almost certainly would not have been as cordial.

Others, as discussed previously, were not. While the governor's office assured the public that Latter-day Saints were at liberty to lecture “on the present state of the territory of Utah, and of the Mormonites and their doctrines,” there were limits to that toleration. “If, under such or any other pretence,” wrote the governor's secretary, T. F. Pilgrim, in a letter published in the Colonial Standard, “an opportunity were to be taken of disturbing the peace, or of promulgating doctrines subversive of social order, . . . or of violating those laws by which decency and morality are protected,” the missionaries “would be responsible and amendable to justice.”Footnote ⁵³ Latter-day Saints were free to preach as long as they did not break local laws by promoting polygamy.

In addition to the legal restrictions placed on their preaching, the missionaries encountered extralegal violence in Kingston. As Aaron Farr described in a letter to church leaders in Salt Lake City, “we had not only been threatened but Shot at.” On the evening of January 19, as Farr and Darwin Richardson were returning to their residence, a “cullard man came onto the Poarch of a Publick house through a crowd,” drew “a Pistole,” and fired it before “run[ning] Back in to the house.” Observers in the street who witnessed the shots “swung their hats and shouted at us,” evidently in an attempt to “scare” the elders. Although Farr maintained that they remained calm and “cooly moved on to our room,” the episode was instrumental in convincing the missionaries to leave Kingston and try their hand in the Jamaican countryside.Footnote ⁵⁴

As the missionaries traversed the mountains and rivers of the Jamaican interior, they encountered another side of the island. They saw the surviving sugar and coffee plantations dotting the landscape, many of which had been subdivided into smaller farms since the abolition of slavery. They also saw fewer and fewer white faces.

Race, Lineage, and Mormon Missions

Following the arrival of James Brown and Elijah Thomas on January 22, the elders counseled together and decided to divide into pairs and preach in different parts of Jamaica. As they “started out in the Cuntry,” two things immediately stood out: the treacherous terrain of the island's interior and the racial demographics of the region. “We found it a hard job to travel threw the Mountains,” wrote Brown. “The weather [was] very hot” and the people “was at least forty blacks to one white.”Footnote ⁵⁵ If the disparity was striking to Brown, a lifelong Southerner raised in a slaveholding family, it was even more so to Aaron Farr, a native New Englander. Farr estimated “that nine tenths” of the island's population was black and remarked that “we did not see more than ten white folks” while traveling the Jamaican countryside.Footnote ⁵⁶ While the missionaries had interacted with plenty of black people in Kingston and Spanish Town, their few preaching appointments had been to mixed-race audiences. In the island's interior, that was not an option. The elders’ efforts among the predominantly black population forced them to confront the place of race in their missionary labors and in Mormon theology more broadly.

The scope of early Mormon missionary efforts was shaped by both their peculiar theology and nineteenth-century western notions of civilization. In 1830, Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon, which he presented as a translation of an ancient record written by “a remnant of the house of Israel” that had left Jerusalem and sailed to the Americas thousands of years before. The book was addressed to those scattered and forgotten Israelites “and also to Jew and Gentile.” Its message was, on its face, racially inclusive. Echoing the apostle Paul's assurance to the Galatians in the New Testament that “there is neither Jew nor Greek” and “neither bond nor free . . . in Christ Jesus,” the Book of Mormon proclaimed to its nineteenth-century readers that “the Lord . . . inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; . . . black and white, bond and free, male and female. . . . All are alike unto God.” But the book also spoke of divinely sanctioned curses, in which those who disobeyed God's commandments were marked with a “skin of blackness.” All people could be potentially redeemed, but disobedience brought the judgment of God.Footnote ⁵⁷

The earliest missions undertaken by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were aimed at two primary groups: white, predominantly Protestant Americans and Native Americans, whom Latter-day Saints believed to be descendants of the Lamanites, a rebellious band of ancient Israelites described in the Book of Mormon. Although the Book of Mormon seemed to identify America's European colonizers as Gentiles, Joseph Smith and his followers eventually came to believe that they, too, were Israelites. As the faith's missionary enterprise expanded over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, Latter-day Saints targeted those they believed to have the “blood of Israel” and, thus, would be predisposed to accept their message. Tapping into existing ideologies of British Israelism, Latter-day Saints sent elders to the British Isles, Western Europe, and British North America.Footnote ⁵⁸

The relationship between where Latter-day Saints preached and their understandings of Israelite lineage and identity, however, worked both ways. At least part of the reason that missionaries continued traveling to England, Ireland, and Wales was the high rate of conversion there. The church's success in those nations reinforced their belief that Anglo-Saxons were Israelites (and, more specifically, Ephraimites, the most favored of the lost tribes). Success in somewhat less expected regions, meanwhile, caused Latter-day Saints to revise and expand their understandings about who was included among the lost tribes of Israel.

In 1843, four elders were dispatched to the Pacific Islands with the intent of preaching primarily to English whalers and merchants there. Stopping in French Polynesia, however, the missionaries found a receptive audience among the islands’ indigenous populations. In Tubuai, Addison Pratt baptized sixty people in his first year. Noah Rogers and Benjamin Grouard experienced similar success in Tahiti and then in Anaa, where Grouard baptized more than six hundred men and women in just five months. By the time the missionaries returned to America in 1848, there were more than one thousand converts throughout French Polynesia. Although the French government soon began restricting the access of foreign missionaries to the islands, Mormonism's early success there was enough to convince church leaders to send several dozen additional missionaries to other Pacific islands in the coming years.Footnote ⁵⁹ It also prompted the missionaries to expand their understanding of Israelites to include Polynesian people, with missionary Louisa Pratt, in 1851, identifying the Book of Mormon's Nephites as “the ancient fathers of the Tahitians” and George Q. Cannon proclaiming the native Hawaiians among whom he labored “the seed of Israel.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Like their Protestant counterparts, then, Mormon missionaries’ hierarchies of heathenism, in which they judged different cultures based on their assumed fitness for Christian conversion and Western civilization, were changing and adaptable.Footnote ⁶¹

People of African descent, meanwhile, occupied only a marginal place in early Mormon missiology. A handful of black men and women converted to the church in its early years, but their conversions were almost always incidental to those of white neighbors or friends. The first African American convert to the faith, known simply as “Black Pete,” joined Joseph Smith's Church of Christ as part of a much larger conversion among a predominantly white group of dissident Campbellites in Ohio. Elijah Able and Jane Manning—the best-known black Latter-day Saints of the nineteenth century—likewise each converted after listening to Mormon missionaries preach to white audiences (in Ohio and Connecticut, respectively).Footnote ⁶² The decision to not target enslaved people of color for conversion arose in response to Missourians’ fears in the early 1830s that the Mormons were abolitionists intent on using the state as a refuge for free blacks and escaped slaves. In 1835, Latter-day Saint leaders published a proclamation setting out the church's stance on missions to the enslaved. “We believe it just to preach the gospel to the nations of the earth,” it began, “but we do not believe it right to interfere with bond-servants.” Missionaries were consequently “to neither preach the gospel to, nor baptize them contrary to the will and wish of their masters, nor to meddle with or influence them in the least to cause them to be dissatisfied with their situations in this life.”Footnote ⁶³ While this policy technically welcomed into fellowship both white slaveholders and enslaved African Americans (although only with their master's consent), its general effect was to limit the number of black Latter-day Saints. Some southern slaves did join the church with their masters, but church leaders never organized large missions to enslaved African Americans, unlike Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians in the antebellum United States.Footnote ⁶⁴

When the crowd of anxious Latter-day Saints assembled in the adobe tabernacle on Temple Square for a special conference in August 1852, they may have been surprised to hear that four missionaries had been called to labor in the West Indies, two more were to go to British Guiana, and three others to the Cape of Good Hope. It is unclear just how familiar Latter-day Saints were with the racial demographics of the Caribbean, and those in attendance (including the missionaries assigned to those regions) likely assumed that the elders would prioritize preaching to the white governmental leaders, shippers, and traders there, as had those sent to the Pacific Islands a decade earlier. As in French Polynesia, however, the racial composition of the British West Indies made it inevitable that the elders would also preach to nonwhite peoples. That the call came just months after Brigham Young introduced a new policy forbidding the ordination of black men to the church's lay priesthood made the mission even more intriguing. If black Jamaicans joined the church, would they be ordained? As the first Mormon mission to a place with a predominantly black populace (the missionaries to Jamaica arrived four months before their counterparts traveling to South Africa), the missionaries’ experience in Jamaica had profound consequences for the shape and scope of the racial restriction in the years and decades to come.

After spending two largely unsuccessful weeks in Kingston, the missionaries ventured out into the once expansive sugar and coffee plantations of the Jamaican interior. As they traveled, their interactions with people of color increased. Aaron Farr and Darwin Richardson received multiple invitations to preach from black ministers in both Jamaica's interior and along the island's northern coast. The first such opportunity came while staying with Eliza Kay, the elderly white widow in St. Andrew Parish. “Mr Farls[,] a Black Baptist minister came to see us,” wrote Farr in his journal, “and requested us to his chappel.” Accompanied by Kay and her grandsons, the missionaries addressed the “cullard” congregation. Although Farls was, in Farr's estimation, a “fine man,” neither he nor any of his congregants seemed interested in the message shared.Footnote ⁶⁵

As they continued their travels, the missionaries found several more “opinings among the Blacks.” In St. Andrew, they “met with a Brown Man on the Saboath to Worship,” who gave the elders “a Part of the time” to preach. While boarding at a “Creole Lodging House” in Moneague, they “Preachd and prophesied [for] an hour” to an all-black audience. In Dry Harbour, the elders were invited to preach to “a large Congregation” led by a “Local Minister [who] was a Molatto.” On January 30, Farr “preached in the fore noon,” with Richardson taking a turn “in the after part.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The content of their sermons was inspired by their ongoing frustrations in Jamaica.

At the preaching appointment in Moneague, Farr took as his text the eleventh chapter of Matthew, “whare the saviour says my yoke is easy and his Burden is light.” The idea had come to him as he and Richardson “travailed 36 m[ile]s” through rain, during which “no one would feed or lodge us.”Footnote ⁶⁷ On another occasion, Farr recalled being turned away by a group of “drunken . . . Jews and Catholicks” who were “universally Prepared to give us a kick.” His thoughts then turned to another sermon from the Gospel of Matthew: “The Foxes have holdes and the Birds have nests,” he complained, “but we had not where to lay our heads in safety.” Although the missionaries sometimes wondered if “the Blacks ware Affraid of us,” it was Jamaican's black population that opened both their chapels and their lodging houses to the missionaries when no one else would.Footnote ⁶⁸

As they traveled through the Jamaican interior, the elders grew increasingly dependent upon the hospitality of black Jamaicans. Just a few days into their journey north from Kingston, Darwin Richardson and Aaron Farr “stopped at a Publick house [for] Black people.” Lacking any money, “they would not keep us.” On another occasion, when stuck in a torrential rainstorm far from any housing, they “Stoped at an old abandoned castle,” where they spent the night “on the Bear floor” alongside a black man, who welcomed the missionaries and cooked for them “a rosted yam” and shared his meager dinner of “some cain & sweet Lemmons.” While traveling north from Moneague en route to Dry Harbour, the missionaries found themselves unable to traverse a river. They were rescued by “a Black Man,” who generously “carried us over one river on his Back.” Aaron Farr's note in his diary about the event—“we Blessd him for the same”—is indicative of just how reliant he and Richardson were on black hospitality while away from Kingston.Footnote ⁶⁹

It was the willingness of mixed-race Jamaican women in Moneague to take in the Mormon missionaries that inspired Aaron Farr to preach on Christ's promise to provide weary pilgrims rest. His doing so provided an opportunity for the American missionaries to transcend the cultural, racial, and imperial boundaries that separated them from their black Jamaican audience. As Laurie Maffly-Kipp has shown, Mormon missionaries in the Pacific Islands emphasized that they, too, were victims of “imperial persecution” who shared with the Polynesian people “a legacy of discrimination.” In an 1851 pamphlet, Latter-day Saint apostle Parley P. Pratt noted that Latter-day Saints, like “the people of the coasts and islands of the Pacific,” had also been “disenfranchised, robbed, plundered, [and] dispersed.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The missionaries could certainly have employed similar methods in attempting to appeal to black Jamaicans but, ultimately, opted to pursue an alternate course.

Where Aaron Farr and Darwin Richardson saw reason to bless the black Jamaicans who assisted them, Alfred Lambson grew increasingly resentful of the missionaries’ reliance on black hospitality while on the island. “I would sooner Sleap in the forest among lizzards and tarapins than seak Shelter in their [black people's] dens,” he wrote in a revealing letter to church leaders in Salt Lake City. Lambson accused the mixed-race Jamaican women who offered the elders shelter of ulterior motives. “The yallow gals all love me, and the negrows all hate me,” Lambson explained, recounting the warning issued to him by the captain of the ship that carried the missionaries to Jamaica: “My Dear man, I dont know what your people ware thinking about to send you to the West Indies,” Lambson recalled the captain saying. “The yallar gals will run off with you and the Niggars will call you a pirate.” Beyond the potential for attracting unneeded opposition, the thought of intimate relations with women of African descent repulsed the missionary, who was disgusted by the white “Priests and Merchants” he accused of “Cohabit[ing] with the Negrows” and “Sireing Creole children.” Even the thought of having to “Shake hands with them” offended Lambson, causing “a chil to run over me.” Although he expressed willingness to preach to “Black or white, Bond or free,” he resented being “compeld to eat fruit, and associate, and lodge in the lousey filthy dens with the Negrow.” “My pride,” he concluded, “never taught me to stoop to filthaness” or “to love a negrow or think they ware handsome.”Footnote ⁷¹ Lambson shared with Brigham Young both a revulsion of interracial relations and a fear that it would pollute the church.

While Lambson's preexisting prejudices pushed him to advocate departing the island at first chance, others needed more prompting. For Aaron Farr, it came in a dream. On the same evening that Darwin Richardson dreamt of the burning field of rubbish and the small sheave of oats saved from the fire, Farr saw in a vision “the Market at Kingston,” where “the Blacks ware bringing in all kinds of Vegetation and som[e] meat.” As “the Butcher complained that they never Brot any sheep,” the people replied “they had all turned to Goats.” The dream invoked Christ's parable of the sheep and the goats, in which “the Son of man shall come in his glory” and separate the people of “all nations . . . as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats,” the former “inherit[ing] the kingdom” and “life eternal” and the latter being damned “into everlasting fire.” In Farr's telling, the parable took on explicitly racial tones. The sheep of black Jamaica “had all turned to Goats.”Footnote ⁷² It was not worth the missionaries’ time to continue laboring in a land of irredeemable souls.

Farr expressed that sentiment even more succinctly after preaching to a group of black Baptists. The “cullard” congregation “ware not,” according to Farr, “capaci[t]ated to understand much of our preaching.” As he later reflected in a letter to Brigham Young, black Jamaicans were “an Ignorant, Priest riden[,] once Bond, but now free, Licentious [and] uncouthed” people he feared were “void of human feelings in many respects.”Footnote ⁷³ While the missionaries repeated popular prejudices of the time about black intelligence, emotions, and religiosity, they placed responsibility squarely on the shoulders of white governmental and ecclesiastical leaders. When Farr and Alfred Lambson were “turned out of dores . . . by black people” in Jamaica's Blue Mountains, he blamed “the influence of the Priest.” Likewise, when the elders were prevented from speaking to a large crowd in Kingston, they pointed fingers at the “wicked influence” of “Reveren[d]s [and] Priests.” Regardless of who was to blame, the implications for the future of Mormonism in Jamaica were clear. In his journal, Farr confided that he “thought we had come to a verry Poor Place for our doctrine.”Footnote ⁷⁴ That confession ultimately proved a key turning point in not only the mission to Jamaica but also the future of Mormon missions to black people more broadly.

The implications of Farr's conclusion were not immediately evident to the missionaries but gradually became clear. When the elders first met in council and concluded that the time had come to leave Jamaica, they made plans to visit British Guiana and Barbados, British West Indian colonies with similar racial demographics. After hostile officials prevented the missionaries from setting sail for those places, the elders chose to return to the United States, leaving for New York aboard the steam ship Ohio on February 10. Within weeks of their return, James Brown wrote to Brigham Young, providing a summary of his experience in Jamaica and attempting to justify his failure to fulfill his assigned mission to British Guiana. After recounting the persecution and poor reception the missionaries had met in Jamaica, Brown assured Young that he had “spared no pains in trying to go” to Guiana. He had done his due diligence, talking to “those that have Lived there,” and felt confident that the time was not right for “the Guiana Mission.” In addition to “the Collery[,] Small pox[,] and yellow fever” plaguing the colony, Brown reported that “the people are mostly Africans[,] say Sixty black to one white.”Footnote ⁷⁵ A little more than a year later, Brown's companion Alfred Lambson drew a similar lesson from his experience in Jamaica. In a sermon delivered to a large crowd in Salt Lake City's tabernacle, Lambson concluded that “the Islands . . . had been cursed,” offering as evidence that “9/10th are blacks or mulatto” and, thus, not worthy of further efforts. Jamaica was a cursed land full of cursed people. In a separate letter to George A. Smith, Lambson reiterated his willingness to serve where called. “I was ready for Sea or land, Black or white, Bond or free, whatever the Lord said I was ready to go.” “But has the Lord said[,] Alfred arise and go to the West Indies[?]” he asked rhetorically before offering his own answer: “No.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The lessons learned in Jamaica were beginning to bear fruit.

While Aaron Farr and James Brown recounted the mission and justified its failure to church leaders, Darwin Richardson remained in Jamaica. Although he initially planned to “stay just a few days”—long enough to ordain Joseph and Frederick Smith as priests—he ended up remaining in Kingston for another two months. In addition to baptizing one additional convert, Richardson spent his time writing a pamphlet on polygamy.

Published after leaving Jamaica, The Pre-Existence of Man in the Eternal World defended the Mormon practice of plural marriage by appealing to a belief in the premortal existence of souls. The spirits of all individuals living on earth, he explained, lived in a spirit world before birth. Polygamy was divinely ordained, then, because those spirits were awaiting birth in this world, and God's chosen people had been commanded to ensure that they were born into righteous families. While the majority of the twenty-five-page pamphlet remained focused on the doctrine of plural marriage, Richardson also considered the implications of the church's teachings concerning a pre-earthly existence for understanding the different races inhabiting the world—questions undoubtedly shaped by his experience in Jamaica. Echoing an 1845 sermon by Mormon apostle Orson Hyde, he proposed that those individuals “that were not so valient . . . in keeping the celestial law in full, in their first estate” were “the cause why the curse fell upon Canaan, that he should be a servant of servants, etc.” When those premortal souls were born on earth, he continued, they “receiv[ed] bodies according to their worthiness, either black or white, comely or uncomely, as their pre-existent conduct may deserve.”Footnote ⁷⁷ According to Richardson's reasoning, then, black Jamaicans’ premortal righteousness (or lack thereof) explained their degraded state and inability to accept and embrace the gospel preached by the Latter-day Saint elders. The missionaries’ failure to make any inroads among black Jamaicans was already starting to shape Mormon theology.