I. Two Races, White and Black

Joseph Smith's theology of race redemption appeared first in the Book of Mormon (1829). The book's first prophet, named Lehi, is an Israelite through his ancestor Manasseh.Footnote ⁵ After Lehi's death, the eldest son, Laman, and his wicked followers separate from his younger, righteous brother, Nephi, and abandon their father's religion. The Lamanites’ separation from Nephi's family symbolized their separation from God.

The term “skins of blackness” in Smith's scripture has been equated by some with the metaphor of spiritual degeneracy.Footnote ⁶ However, the Book of Mormon makes a very strong correlation between righteousness (light skin) and wickedness (dark skin). The Lamanites’ skin literally became dark (because of the wickedness of the Lamanites) and they were spiritually “dark” (because of their personal choices). The racial effects of wickedness were first realized spiritually before becoming visible through skin color.Footnote ⁷ The fluidity of skin color in the Book of Mormon is similar to the Bible's use of leprosy. In the Old Testament, God cursed people with this seemingly irrevocable and debilitating disease to signal disfavor to both the cursed as well as favor to their righteous peers. Like leprosy in the Bible, Smith described skin color as an entity subject to change based on God's blessing or curse. The Book of Mormon employs race both as figurative and literal manifestations of impurity that only God can heal. Wicked Laman's geographic separation from righteous Nephi is more than a separation from family—although that is an important detail. It is a separation from God and the blessings of the Abrahamic covenant. The Book of Mormon narrator records that the Lamanites accepted the Nephites’ religion; upon returning to the Abrahamic covenant, “their skin became white like unto the Nephites.”Footnote ⁸

Smith viewed dark skin as a sign of the curse demarcating a separation from the Abrahamic covenant. The turning away from God was a racial issue as much as it was a religious one. Smith never referred to African-descended peoples when he discussed those with “skins of blackness.” Smith's religio-racial logic did not deny persons of any lineage or legal status but allowed for the possibility of the redemption of all peoples from both sin and dark skin. Both African Americans and Native Americans could gain the blessings of Abraham, including ecclesiastical priesthood office, by conversion. This quest to offer “both Jew and Gentile” the blessings of Abraham and the promise of equal footing with whites went beyond what most other Protestants preached at the time.Footnote ⁹

The Mormon prophet combined a belief in the exclusivist British Israelitism with his own unique strain of Christian universalism to account for the vexing question of varying skin color in the human family.Footnote ¹⁰ By virtue of having the blood of ancient Israel flowing through their veins, early Mormons and other nineteenth-century people believed that righteous whites (Israelites) possessed physical and spiritual traits attributable to their Abrahamic lineage. Moreover, this bondage extended to peoples traditionally placed outside of the Abrahamic family, especially individuals of African descent. In an effort to offer the blessings of Abraham to all peoples, Smith configured race as a “spiritual rather than physical bondage.”Footnote ¹¹ This innovation provided a path for Africans to become heirs to God's promises to Abraham. In the New Testament, John the Baptist preached to the Pharisees and Sadducees that their Abrahamic lineage did not elevate their relationship or access to God. Indeed, John the Baptist informed the Jews, “God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.”Footnote ¹² Joseph Smith similarly believed that Abrahamic lineage did not matter in relation to salvation or divine favor. God could raise up anyone, including Africans, as heirs or “children of Abraham.”

Historian Peter Silver has observed that many white people in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world believed one's “own actions and environments could alter them even at the deepest levels—which was one way of saying that no levels of difference lay especially deep.”Footnote ¹³ As a result, white Christians did not generally withhold the possibility of salvation from peoples of African descent, and they considered peoples of African descent to be humans, although not equal to whites. Some slaveholders encouraged the religious instruction of their chattel property under close white supervision.Footnote ¹⁴ Although salvation was possible, the redemption of African souls through Christianity did not allow converts to gain the visible privilege of whiteness—white skin.Footnote ¹⁵ Joseph Smith simultaneously viewed peoples of color as sinful and inferior while also allowing room for them to receive racial and soteriological redemption.

Joseph Smith did not exclude those he believed were born outside of the bloodlines of Israel, such as peoples of African descent, from becoming heirs to the promised blessings of Abraham.Footnote ¹⁶ They could be adopted into Israel, assume priesthood office, and eventually receive what early Mormons believed was the Abrahamic covenant's distinguishing physical characteristic—white skin.Footnote ¹⁷ The racial theology of early Mormonism provided an explanation for the social problem of racial difference and promised that such distinctions would be swallowed up when converts became new creatures in Christ through baptism. When people of African descent converted to Mormonism and became heirs to Abraham, their racial curses would be lifted and they would become white. As sociologist Armand Mauss has explained, “Although the [Mormon] gospel and the Abrahamic covenant are ultimately for everyone,” Israelites enjoyed a privileged status by already having a claim to Abraham's blessings. Their return would be a smoother transition than those born outside of the Abrahamic covenant.Footnote ¹⁸ Smith viewed the birthright blessings associated with the Abrahamic covenant as tied to Israelite blood—thus the need for new blood and the physical transformation of converts.

This theological innovation went beyond any other religious theories of race during Smith's lifetime by providing a means for Africans to become heirs to the Abrahamic covenant. Most Christians who believed peoples of African descent could become heirs of salvation omitted any sort of racial purification from their doctrinal tenets. They did not see any purpose for redeeming a fleeting, temporal characteristic such as race.Footnote ¹⁹ Early Americans would have viewed persons as “ill-informed or doctrinaire to use skin color as an index of something essential.”Footnote ²⁰ Likewise, those that aimed for the racial uplifting of peoples of African descent omitted any sort of religious mechanisms for racial change from their practices and beliefs.Footnote ²¹ American Protestants and Catholics generally viewed salvation and racial uplift as separate issues in the quest to improve the lot of Africans, both in heaven and on earth.

The Mormon prophet's belief in racial redemption did not align with his American contemporaries. Most Americans believed that skin color resulted from mitigating factors, such as class or living environment, and was malleable in relation to those factors. Jacksonian definitions of race matched what today is called “ethnicity,” reflecting a person's lineage rather than skin color. There is some evidence that eighteenth-century Moravians believed that conversion to Christianity could lead to a change in skin color over multiple generations.Footnote ²² However, most white Americans believed that Africans (born as “hereditary heathens”) could become as civilized as whites or see their dark skin become white.Footnote ²³

II. The Curse of Cain and the Soul of Man

Two events caused Joseph Smith to expound upon his peculiar doctrine of racial redemption as his religion moved to Ohio during the winter of 1830 to 1831. First, Mormonism embraced its first convert of African descent. One Ohio newspaper described the proselyte “Black Pete” as a “revelator . . . sometimes seized with strange vagaries and odd conceits.” A Philadelphia-based newspaper informed its readers, “The Mormonites have among them an African,” adding the convert's sensational belief that he could fly.Footnote ²⁴ Although Black Pete soon left the Mormonites, his presence caused Smith to grapple with the racial differences in his burgeoning church. The Mormon prophet's own intellectual wrestling with the theological ramifications of race is evident in his articulation of the Curse of Cain in his “Visions of Moses,” revelations published in Smith's lifetime and canonized as the Book of Moses after his death.Footnote ²⁵

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians had equated Cain's mark with black Africans for centuries, but white Christians had seized upon the idea to maintain their status in the racial hierarchy in the seventeenth century. Theologians in the Jacksonian era furthered this trend.Footnote ²⁶ According to the account of the first fratricide in Genesis, God cursed Cain for murdering his brother, Abel, in a fit of jealousy. God cursed Cain to be “a fugitive and a vagabond” on the earth and marked his skin to warn others against seeking revenge for Abel's murder.Footnote ²⁷

Smith's account of Abel's murder at the hands of his brother in a revelation he received while completing his Visions of Moses added significant detail to the account in the King James Bible. Smith rendered a more complex narrative that included Cain's choice to learn Satan's secrets in order to “murder and get gain,” only murdering his brother when Satan delivered him into his hands. Cain relocated to the land of Nod where he now bore a divine mark of darkness.Footnote ²⁸ After narrating the generational sinfulness of Cain and his posterity, Smith's scripture states, “The seed of Cain were black, and had not place among” the rest of the human family.Footnote ²⁹

Smith's account of Abel's murder possesses several parallels to the separation of the Lamanites from the Nephites in the Book of Mormon. In both accounts, the elder brother is jealous of the piety and divine favor bestowed upon a younger brother. Both Laman and Cain become infuriated, either murder or attempt to murder their brothers, and geographically separate themselves from their siblings. Moreover, in both cases, Smith's scripture narrated the placing of some sort of mark upon the body of the offender. Indeed, a failure to adhere to God's commandments results in the removal of divine favor and the perpetuation of the divine curse or mark. Smith's iteration of Genesis 4 tethered Cain's mark, like the Lamanites’ skins of blackness, to personal righteousness and familial relationships. Sins that caused divine curses also made the Lamanite people “fugitive[s] and . . . vagabond[s],” literally without a family or home.Footnote ³⁰ The mark signified the dissolution of family bonds while simultaneously labeling physical characteristics as reflections of individual obedience to God's commandments.

Another theological development of Smith's cemented the link between the physical body and personal righteousness. In 1833, the Mormon prophet dictated a revelation that addressed Mormon eschatology and soteriology in the bulk of its text, although one section articulated an uncommon interpretation of the relationship between body and spirit. Writing in the voice of Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith declared, “The spirit and the body is the soul of man.”Footnote ³¹ Few, if any, theologians had labeled the spirit and body as one.Footnote ³² Defining the soul as both physical and intangible spirit formally enunciated what had previously been an implicit relationship between an individual's personal righteousness and their physical body. Race, in short, was both corporeal and spiritual in nature.

III. Elijah Abel: Soul Made White, Robes Glistening

Joseph Smith's likely religio-racial hopes materialized in the person of Elijah Abel, a convert of African descent to Mormonism. Abel's conversion made him “actually of the seed of Abraham,” as Christians believed the blood of Christ made converts an heir of salvation.Footnote ³³ After all, in the words of Mormon hymnist, printer, and theologian W. W. Phelps, anyone who had faith in Christ “were equally entitled to the blessings of Abraham, whether they were his fleshly seed or not; it mattered not from whom they descended; for if through faith they were enabled to get into Christ Jesus, they would be considered Abraham's children and heirs according to the promise.”Footnote ³⁴ This transformation led to Abel's ordination to the office of Seventy in Mormonism's ecclesiastical priesthood hierarchy, a responsibility connected to missionary work.Footnote ³⁵ He also received a “patriarchal blessing” and participated in new liturgy introduced to Mormonism in their first temple at Kirtland, Ohio, called “washings and anointing.”Footnote ³⁶ He proselytized as a missionary in cities with large black populations in the United States and Canada and presided over both whites and peoples of African descent in Ohio.Footnote ³⁷ Smith did not require Abel to work under the close supervision of whites, like his contemporary Christians who restricted black preachers did, although some white missionaries asked him to do so by the end of his mission.Footnote ³⁸ Abel's ordination to the Mormon priesthood and ministry, though he was a “mullato,” demonstrates that Smith viewed Abel as a spiritual equal and that he possessed the talents and capability to lead peoples of all races.Footnote ³⁹ Abel preached to both blacks and whites, embodying Joseph Smith's multiracial religious vision. Whether an individual descended from “Shem, Ham, or Japheth, in Christ they should be blessed; for God will abound to all who are in Christ Jesus.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Elijah Abel's own patriarchal blessing demonstrates the promises and limits of Smith's racial egalitarianism. A patriarchal blessing is a blessing from an ordained patriarch (in the vein of Old Testament patriarchs like Abraham), which dispenses direction and advice to the receiver. The blessing also declares the blood lineage of the receiver in relation to his or her Israelite heritage.Footnote ⁴¹ This mingling of biological families and religious community created a new “sacerdotal family” that allowed converts born outside of perceived Israelite bloodlines to join the Abrahamic covenant. In historian Samuel Brown's words, patriarchal “blessings represent one of the first indications that early Mormons” would embrace religious innovations calibrated to extend the Christian Gospel and Abrahamic covenant to all people.Footnote ⁴² The earliest church patriarch in Mormonism, Joseph Smith Sr., the father of the prophet, pronounced Elijah Abel's patriarchal blessing, as he did for hundreds of other Mormons from 1834 to 1840.Footnote ⁴³ Abel's blessing does not declare Abel's status as a blood member of the house of Israel.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, the blessing's contents yield valuable information. Abel's blessing promised a future ordaining to the ecclesiastical office of elder and that he would “be made equal to thy brethren and thy soul [shall be] be white in eternity and thy robes glittering.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Joseph Smith Sr.’s blessing tied Abel to the ecclesiastical priesthood. According to historian Samuel Brown, “Priesthood offered a metaphysical substitute for blood, a power that defined and transformed human beings and their relationships.” For Abel, this meant that, despite his non-Israelite heritage, his ordination made him a part of Israel. In other words, “Biological ties could be unreliable; sacerdotal ties were secure.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Ordination to the Mormon ecclesiastical priesthood made Abel a “son of Moses,” a member of the bloodline of Israel and an heir to the Abrahamic covenant according to a revelation received by Joseph Smith in 1832. This line of thinking is present in other patriarchal blessings. For example, in 1839, Joseph Smith Sr. declared a white man named John Landers a spiritual “orphan” outside of the bloodlines of Israel. However, the elder Smith promised him that, through his patriarchal blessing, his blood had been transformed so that “little or no gentile blood remain[ed] in him.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Despite the wording of these blessings, it is impossible to determine whether Smith or any other Mormon accepted Abel's ordination as proof of a physical transformation.Footnote ⁴⁸

Smith's belief that both the body and the spirit formed the “soul of man” alters the way in which the statement “soul be white” should be received. Abel's patriarchal blessing did not merely promise his soul's future status as clean before God (symbolized by his glittering robes). When considering Joseph Smith Jr.’s teachings on the body and spirit comprising the human “soul,” it is possible that the prophet's father could have been prophesying that Abel's skin would physically transform from black to white. Both his soul (body and spirit) would be white as his promised glittering robes “in eternity,” although his skin would not become white immediately, perhaps not even during Abel's lifetime. This uncertainty about the timing of Abel's gentile blood purge reveals the ways in which Smith's teachings surrounding the doctrine of racial redemption were not fully formed when Abel received his patriarchal blessing. The Mormon prophet's haphazard attempts to mend the racial problems of his day through religion were optimistic but far from firm.

During the years Abel served his missions, received the Mormon ecclesiastical priesthood, and led local congregations, other Americans stated their belief that Christianity would help hereditary heathens overcome their lowly spiritual station. For instance, in 1838, future United States president John Tyler opined, “[God] works most inscrutably to the understandings of men; the Negro is torn from Africa, a barbarian, ignorant and idolatrous.” Tyler believed that, in spite of their natural predilections, Africans could become “civilized, enlightened, and Christian” through exposure to white culture.Footnote ⁴⁹ Joseph Smith's religious worldview concurred with Tyler's as far as he believed that peoples of African descent would become “civilized, enlightened” through conversion. However, he also took the process a step further. He believed that converts could eventually be released from their racial curses by God.

However, Smith's spiritual egalitarianism was tempered in the political sphere. In 1833, the Mormon newspaper editor W. W. Phelps wrote an article titled “Free People of Color.” Phelps quoted “clauses from the laws of Missouri,” which enumerated the status of free blacks in the American state that housed the Mormon Zion. Phelps closed the article by proclaiming Mormons had “no special rule in the Church, as to people of color [; therefore] let prudence guide, and while they, as well as we, are in the hands of a merciful God, we say: Shun every appearance of evil.” He also praised the work of abolitionists and those that called for black African repatriation, speaking favorably of “abolishing slavery, and colonizing the blacks, in Africa.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Phelps's article sparked a firestorm of controversy. The citizens of Jackson County decried the words of the non-slaveholding Mormons and labeled them “deluded fanaticks [sic].” These Missourians believed Phelps's article invited free blacks from other states to convert to Mormonism, organize, and attack whites.Footnote ⁵¹ Fear of slave and native uprisings were common features of regions in which African slaves outnumbered whites.Footnote ⁵² Accordingly, the reactions to Phelps's article serve to illuminate Missouri's political and social sensitivities to slavery. His article appeared only fifteen years after the Missouri Compromise and four years after Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia, where the religious leader had organized a massive, failed slave revolt through contacts acquired in his ministry.Footnote ⁵³ As sectional tensions began to escalate again in the midst of abolitionism, the citizens of slave regions were often as vigilantly suspicious of political interlopers from the North as they were of their chattel slaves. Smith attempted to dampen the Missourians’ fears by directing Phelps to publish a statement that assured the western settlers that Mormons were “opposed to having free people of color admitted into the state; and we say, that none will be admitted into the Church.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Smith hesitated to proselytize peoples of African descent for pragmatic reasons, so as not to provoke the hornet's nest of slaveholders in Missouri and elsewhere.

Latter-day Saint spiritual egalitarianism had significant ramifications for Mormonism's reputation, and Joseph Smith sought political safety while simultaneously proselytizing peoples of African descent. Nevertheless, early Mormons offered only a conditional political status to peoples of African descent. It was one thing for Joseph Smith to state in the abstract that blacks could acquire white skin; it was another to stick to his theological guns when the political cost ran high. Above all else, Smith was a pragmatist who wanted his fledgling church to survive to accomplish the work of preparing for the Second Coming of Christ. Three years later, despite his earlier statement, Smith declared that Mormons would not “interfere with slaves [or freed or escaped slaves], contrary to the mind and will of their masters.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The Mormon prophet later supported a gradual abolition plan while he ran for president, which suggests his views changed on slavery and other race issues.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, his support of abolition came when his own political position and personal safety were much less tenuous. It may not have mattered whether a convert “were Scythian, Barbarian, bond or free, Jew or Gentile, Greek or Roman.” Africans, Asians, and Europeans could receive Mormon baptism and officiate in its ordinances and offices, but Mormons declined to defend the rights of Africans if it meant harm would come to their church.Footnote ⁵⁷ He could not afford to take a stand against both Missourians and his fellow Mormons.

In some ways, the inchoateness of Smith's religio-racial doctrine reflects the uncertainty around the place of free peoples of African descent in American politics. Whites that championed abolitionism or colonization reflected an uneasiness with or disapproval of slavery but not a belief in the inherent equality of African-descended peoples. Politicians that opposed slavery for any number of reasons did not necessarily think that black men should receive the same privileges as white men. When Smith preached his doctrine of racial redemption, it is likely that he separated religious doctrine from political or economic equality. Placing a wall between religion and politics allowed him to justify colonization, condemn interracial marriage, and support segregation while allowing Abel to serve in Mormonism's ecclesiastical structure.Footnote ⁵⁸

IV. Nauvoo: New Liturgy, a New “Priesthood,” and New Possibilities

By 1838, Smith's attempt to straddle religious egalitarianism and political safety came to an unceremonious end. In the fall of 1838, Missourians secured legal permission to exterminate or otherwise drive Mormons “from the state, for the public peace.” Missouri's governor, Lilburn W. Boggs, wrote that Mormons had committed “outrages beyond all de[s]cription,”Footnote ⁵⁹ including “conniving with the Indians, and stirring up the Negroes to rebel against their masters, with a multitude of things of a similar character: which all tend to establish the ignorance and corruption of their authors.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Missourians feared the Mormons would join with Indians and “negroes” in combat against their non-Mormon neighbors. Despite Apostle Parley Pratt's report that there had never even been as many as “one dozen free negroes or mulattoes” that had joined Smith's church from 1830 to 1840, Missourians believed Mormons shared the interests of “negroes” over whites.Footnote ⁶¹ Although Mormons had attempted to separate their cause from the aims of blacks, Americans racialized Mormons as outsiders, foreigners, and savages.Footnote ⁶² Such castigations underscore Mormonism's (imperfectly) inclusive ideas on race in the midst of other American Christian racial beliefs. Because of unrest attributable to several causes, including racial beliefs, Joseph Smith and several other Mormon leaders were arrested and spent much of the fall and winter of 1838 to 1839 in the confines of the jail at Liberty, Missouri, for treason and other charges.

When Smith escaped from Liberty Jail and established a new Mormon headquarters at Nauvoo, Illinois, he introduced a revolutionary theology and a slew of rituals. These new teachings and liturgy were designed to tie the human race to one another and ensure the salvation of every heir of the Abrahamic covenant. The Mormon prophet's radical new means of tying the entire human family to one another through ordinances now only performed in Mormon temples had enormous ramifications for peoples of all races. Smith framed his religious innovation in the Abrahamic covenant as he read it from the Bible, combining God's promises to Abraham with his mission to gather all peoples, regardless of race, to Mormonism.

The ordinance of sealing, by which Smith sought to bind men and women to one another both “in heaven and in earth,” is the most relevant of Mormonism's liturgical innovations here.Footnote ⁶³ Historians have often used the ordinance of sealing and plural marriage as interchangeable terms. However, to say Smith practiced plural marriage oversimplifies his religious innovations. Smith “sealed” or bound individuals and couples into his eternal household while binding other men and women together as heads of their own eternal kinship networks. Those men and women were in turn to be sealed to their children (biological or adopted as spiritual progeny), individual women, or other couples, creating a hierarchical system that placed authority with the original sealed couple. Smith viewed this as an outgrowth of the Christian notion of adoption, wherein a convert to Christianity became a son or daughter of God through conversion (and, in the Mormon tradition, baptism). Smith's theological twist reflected his understanding of the Abrahamic covenant. Smith preached when he sealed man and woman to one another that it would guarantee their salvation as well as connect them to God and to himself.Footnote ⁶⁴ At its heart, sealing promised “a network of eternal belonging for the Latter-day Saints” through a “broader goal of establishing the heavenly family.” The Mormon prophet's innovations opened up the definition of family to mean anyone within an eternal kinship network. The endowment's narrative arc followed Adam and Eve, opening an expansive view of “family” and relationships.Footnote ⁶⁵

Smith and his compatriots called this new liturgy, including the sealing ordinance, “the priesthood”—what I call “temple priesthood”—separate from but connected to Mormonism's ecclesiastical authority. Smith introduced the concept of ecclesiastical priesthood in the early 1830s as he created church offices to meet the needs of a growing church.Footnote ⁶⁶ The temple priesthood originated during Smith's formulation of the new liturgy, what today is called the endowment and sealing ritual.Footnote ⁶⁷ Many have called the sealing ritual “polygamy,” but Joseph Smith never referred to these rites as “marriages.” Instead, they functioned as an initiation ritual into an “order” of priesthood with special responsibilities that men and women joined through the endowment and sealing liturgy, in addition to accepting positions in the ecclesiastical priesthood. Historian Kathleen Flake defines the men who served as priests in this new order of priesthood as those having “the right to access the powers of heaven and to mediate or exercise those heavenly powers for the benefit of others on earth.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Mormon men that held the ecclesiastical priesthood were expected to officiate in ordinances and govern the church. Mormon men and women that received their endowment and the sealing ordinance counted themselves as members of a temple priesthood.

Smith's new temple liturgy, like patriarchal blessings, blurred the lines between biological family and Mormonism's religious community identity marker, the Abrahamic covenant. Mormon men and women that were sealed to one another were given power to save those that were sealed to them. One of Smith's sermons in March 1844 indicated that Mormonism's new liturgy had the power to ensure the salvation of any person that participated in the ordinance of sealing. As Smith explained, “When you get to heaven tell your father that what you seal on earth should be sealed in heaven. I will walk through the gate of heaven and Claim what I seal & those that follow me & my Council.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Mormons that had received the sealing ordinance or other temple liturgy from Joseph Smith could expect to “mediate or exercise . . . heavenly powers for the benefit of others on earth [or in heaven].”Footnote ⁷⁰

In a revelation given to his wife, Emma Smith, the Mormon prophet framed this liturgy in Abrahamic terms, invoking the plural marriages and spiritual blessings of the patriarch and his sons, Isaac and Jacob.Footnote ⁷¹ In the words of historian Jonathan A. Stapley, “kinship, priesthood, government, and salvation became synonymous” in early Mormonism as the temple liturgy unfolded.Footnote ⁷² Mormons believed that men and couples’ priesthood, power, and honor were reflected in the number of individuals sealed to them. Smith sealed himself to the family members of other Mormon hierarchs in order to forge eternal and temporal relationships through temple liturgy. Those individuals had others sealed to them, creating a great chain of hierarchical relationships that would eventually connect the entire human race to one another through interlinking covenant relationships between all of humanity and God.Footnote ⁷³ The hierarchical nature of the “sealing” of one person to another also created relationships designed to connect the entire human family to one another, with Smith at the top of the chain (what historian Samuel Brown has called the Chain of Belonging).Footnote ⁷⁴ The Mormon prophet shaped these “welding links” between his closest friends and confidantes with the belief that those relationships would perpetuate throughout the eternities.Footnote ⁷⁵ He tethered these relationships to Abrahamic blessings of priesthood and having children as numerous as sands on the seashore or stars in the sky.

V. Jane Elizabeth Manning James and the Incorporation of Africans into the Sealing Ritual

Only one person of African descent may have been asked to participate in Smith's Nauvoo-era temple liturgy. Jane Elizabeth Manning James had converted to Mormonism in Connecticut, probably in 1839, and later led a group of free African Americans to Nauvoo from the eastern United States.Footnote ⁷⁶ When her group arrived in Nauvoo, Joseph and Emma Smith invited James to live in their household as a servant. In the course of her work, Smith permitted her to “handle” the Urim and Thummim, the tools Smith used to translate the Book of Mormon.Footnote ⁷⁷

According to an interview with James recorded nearly sixty years later, she became aware of Joseph Smith's sealings in 1843 from women she called “Brother Josephs [sic] four wives.” These women asked James, “What would you think if a man had more wives than one?” She responded by jumping up, clapping her hands, and exclaiming, “That's good.” One of Smith's “wives” approvingly assured the other women, “She is all right, just listen she believes it all now.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Later, in return for her friendship and loyalty, Emma Smith reportedly offered to have James sealed into the Smiths’ eternal household “as a child.” James reported to her biographer that, after two weeks of considering the offer, she replied to Emma, “No Mam [sic]! Because I did not understand or know what it meant.”Footnote ⁷⁹

James's sealing as a “child” does not make sense in the context of Smith's actions surrounding his new liturgy. Men and women were sealed as the spiritually adopted “children” of couples, or heirs to an eternal household, only after the death of Joseph Smith. Only one “adoption” took place in the 1840s, and it was to a man who was not “adopted” until after Smith's death. Women became, in later parlance, “wives” rather than adopted members of a spiritual family.Footnote ⁸⁰ The way that James positions herself in her autobiography presents several pieces of evidence that open the possibility of her being offered a place in Smith's eternal household. The first sentence of her autobiography begins with her leaving her family to live with “a family of white people.” She rehearses her experiences with the “Gift of Tongues.” When one of the children in the family became ill, her traveling companions “healed the child.”Footnote ⁸¹ Through this narrative, she places herself within a white family as well as the Mormon milieu of charismatic spiritual gifts.

This candid confession suggests that Emma may have introduced the concept of joining their eternal family in theological terms that James (or Emma) did not completely understand. The context of Emma Smith's offer is unclear, but it is likely that she meant to invite James to join the Smith's kinship network, thereby connecting James to the spiritual lineage of the Smith family instead of the cursed lineage of Cain or Ham. Because the first Mormons who participated in the ritual of sealing did not define their marriage partners as “wives,” “child” may have been deemed a sufficient designation for the relationship. Another reason for the designation of “child”—rather than sealing partner or “wife”—is Emma Smith's distrust of her husband in matters related to the sealing ordinance.Footnote ⁸² Because women of African descent were often viewed as sexual objects, Emma may have been especially careful to designate James as a “child” instead of as an equal partner in the Smith's kinship network, which could have led to a sexual relationship with liturgical sanction.

The possibility of James's proposed sealing as a wife presents several interesting interpretations. Considering the soteriological qualities of Mormonism's temple liturgy, Smith could have viewed James's sealing as a way of saving both her and her family “by virtue of the covenant” she would enter into with Joseph and Emma Smith.Footnote ⁸³ If the offer of sealing took place, there is a possibility that the Smiths viewed this as a means of incorporating not only white women but women of African descent into the temple priesthood. It is also possible that in Smith's developing cosmological worldview he considered inviting individuals of African descent to join the temple priesthood in the same way that he permitted men of African descent to become a part of Mormonism's ecclesiastical priesthood. In any event, inclusion in Smith's eternal kinship network would have cemented James's place in the Abrahamic covenant and created a familial relationship with James. She would not be like the dark-skinned Lamanites and Cainites who had separated themselves from their families, the Abrahamic covenant, and God's ecclesiastical priesthood through their wickedness. She would be a proper member of Smith's family and a true heir of Abraham.

This status as an heir of Abraham is reflected in a patriarchal blessing that James received from Joseph Smith's brother Hyrum in 1844. Hyrum Smith, then serving as the Presiding Patriarch in the LDS Church, declared that James was an heir of the lineage of Ham. While this is not a surprise, considering contemporary beliefs about black Africans and the lineage of Ham or Cain, Patriarch Smith promised that God could have James's divine “mark” taken from her “and stamped with his image if she remained faithful.”Footnote ⁸⁴ When Emma Smith offered to “adopt” James, she would have relied upon a strain of her husband's thought—namely, that individuals could overcome their cursed heritage and become heirs to the blessings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

This reflects what historian Max Perry Mueller calls a “covenantal contract,” wherein a man or woman could overcome the supposed curse associated with their linage through their faithfulness. This contract hearkens back to what Joseph Smith Sr. promised Elijah Abel in his patriarchal blessing—that through faithfulness he could “be made equal to thy brethren and thy soul be white in eternity and thy robes glittering.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Although neither James nor Abel is given a specific date for when their covenantal status would be reflected in their outward appearance, it seems that the idea of racial redemption was alive and well in Smith's family, or at least among church patriarchs, who were given the religious imperative to declare spiritual lineage.Footnote ⁸⁶

VI. Succession, American Race Culture, and the Cosmology of Cain's Curse

Joseph Smith met a violent death at the hands of a mob in 1844, at least in part because of issues related to the new sealing liturgy he introduced in Nauvoo. The first Mormon prophet had outlined at least eight different plans for succession in the LDS presidency during his lifetime, which left his church in a theological and ecclesiastical crisis.Footnote ⁸⁷ Several leaders jostled with one another to become Smith's successor, including Smith's longtime counselor, Sidney Rigdon, and Brigham Young, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Rigdon argued that no man could replace Smith but that he would act as the church's guardian to protect Smith's doctrines from corruption. He also downplayed the importance of the temple liturgy. Rigdon argued, “It [was] not necisary [sic] to build this Temple . . . if the Temple is build [sic], the Twelve have no power to administer the endowment [liturgy].”Footnote ⁸⁸ In contrast, Young's case for the ecclesiastical authority of the apostles hinged upon the argument that Smith had conferred upon them the rights and privilege of governance in the event of his death.Footnote ⁸⁹

The majority of Nauvoo Mormons chose Young over Rigdon by virtue of Young's claim to have authority over the sealing liturgy and temple ordinances. However, Sidney Rigdon did not give up without a fight. He tried to persuade influential Mormons to follow him instead of Young by arguing that only Smith could pronounce doctrine and that it was Rigdon's duty to conserve Smith's teachings in perpetuity without any new revelations. He would serve as a guardian of the church without holding the office of church president occupied by Smith.Footnote ⁹⁰

In February 1845, Apostle Orson Hyde sought to discredit Rigdon as a viable option for church leadership by arguing that the apostles held the keys of the kingdom and the authority to perform priesthood ordinances.Footnote ⁹¹ He proceeded to outline the Mormon belief in a premortal council of all God's children, in which Satan had attempted to overthrow God's plan for human trial and redemption. According to Hyde, Lucifer, like Rigdon, had attempted to usurp priesthood authority for his own glorification and had been cast out for his disobedience.Footnote ⁹² Hyde likened Mormons who could not make up their minds about following Young or Rigdon to those who had been on the fence when choosing between God's and Satan's respective plans for salvation before the world's creation. Hyde declared that members of the “African race” had not fully supported God's plan. As a result, on earth they received the cursed bodies of the “negro.”Footnote ⁹³

In the weeks following Hyde's speech, Apostle John Taylor wrote in the official LDS newspaper, Times and Season, that, because Noah's son Ham had dishonored the priesthood, his posterity had been cursed as a result. Taylor argued that to help Africans overcome their position through abolition (or other means) was “to make void the curse of God.” His article also unfavorably compared Ham to Shem and Japheth (Noah's other sons) in order to demonstrate they had been blessed for their righteousness with light skin.Footnote ⁹⁴

Hyde and Taylor laid the groundwork to undo Joseph Smith's teachings on the redemption of race. These apostles viewed skin color as an inescapable punishment for black Africans because of their own volition (premortal fence sitting) or their ancestors’ choices (made by Ham or Cain). Hyde's pronouncements reject what Joseph Smith had told him in the course of a conversation about the “situation of the Negro” in 1844.Footnote ⁹⁵ Smith had informed Hyde that Africans had “come into the world slaves mentally & phy[s]ically,” and if one changed their circumstances with white men, they would behave like whites. Nonetheless, Smith desired to “confine [Negroes] by strict Laws to their own Species [and] put them on national Equalization.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Smith supported African colonization and believed that they had the potential to act, think, vote, and govern as white men did over their own kind.Footnote ⁹⁷ Hyde and Taylor's published writings reveal that Smith's ideas on racial redemption had begun to erode less than a year after his death.

However, the doctrine of racial redemption had not disappeared entirely. Joseph Smith's brother William, serving as Church Patriarch after Hyrum Smith's assassination alongside the Mormon prophet, gave a blessing to Joseph T. Ball, a Mormon of African descent.Footnote ⁹⁸ Ball's blessing declared that his name was “enrolled with the house of Israel upon sacred Records deposited in the archives of the temple, as a memorial and a testimony of thy faithfulness and good works.” Counting his name with those on the rolls of the temple made him an heir of the Abrahamic covenant to whom “the blessing of the Holy Priesthood been handed down and thou art of that Royal Stock.”Footnote ⁹⁹

William Smith's declarations belie several important tenets. First, it shows that the patriarchal blessing was viewed by those that delivered them as a means of grafting non-Israelites into the house of Israel and the Abrahamic covenant. Ball's “Royal Stock” signified his worthiness of receiving the ecclesiastical office of high priest. Second, William Smith announcing Ball's enrollment in the name of the “sacred Records . . . of the Temple” probably refers to records kept by Mormons that granted individuals access to temple ordinances and, eventually, to exaltation. The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles controlled these records and, with them, access to the temple. William Smith was likely declaring that Ball could participate in temple liturgy and thereby become a member of the temple priesthood through the wording of his patriarchal blessing.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, the LDS Church excommunicated William Smith in October 1845, less than six months before Mormons began to leave Missouri for the Great Basin. With William's departure went the final link to Joseph Smith's doctrine of racial redemption. The doctrine was only ever espoused by the Mormon prophet and members of his family; it therefore did not survive the trek west to Utah.

VII. Exodus: Interracial Marriage and the Mingling of Blood

By February 1846, violent conflicts between Mormons and non-Mormons precipitated a westward-moving Mormon exodus from Nauvoo. In February of that year, William McCary, a man of African descent, converted to the LDS Church and married Lucia Stanton, the white daughter of a prominent Mormon.Footnote ¹⁰¹ McCary fabricated a biracial identity and claimed to be half Native American and half African when he joined the Mormons at Winter Quarters, Nebraska. He also proclaimed himself as “Adam, the Ancient of days” and claimed to have received several revelations for the church. He proceeded to enter into sexual relationships with women whom he claimed to have been sealed by Mormon liturgy. Brigham Young had never given his permission for McCary to be sealed to other women, and, as a result, the LDS Church excommunicated him.Footnote ¹⁰²

Although LDS Church leaders insisted McCary's interracial marriage had not been the root cause of his excommunication, Apostle Parley Pratt declared McCary had the “blood of Ham in him which linege [sic] was cursed as regards to priesthood.” Although speaking about those Mormons that wished to follow McCary rather than LDS Church leaders, Pratt framed McCary's claims to the temple priesthood as theologically impossible.Footnote ¹⁰³ Furthermore, in 1847, at roughly the same time as McCary's excommunication, Brigham Young also learned that Enoch Lewis, the son of a black Mormon man named Q. Walker Lewis, had married a white woman. Historian Connell O'Donovan has suggested that Lewis's son's marriage to a white woman sparked Young's formation of Mormonism's priesthood and temple restriction because he feared black men entering into plural marriage relationships with a myriad of white women and mixing the blood of Israel with those outside the Abrahamic covenant.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Pratt's statement about McCary, John Taylor's article in the Times and Seasons, and Orson Hyde's speech to the Nauvoo High Priest Quorum demonstrate that several of Smith's apostles did not share his vision for a united human family regardless of race or skin color. It is likely that Smith's nonlinear beliefs about race and priesthood caused confusion among the Latter-day Saints leadership that survived him. When a race issue arose, they embraced cultural and theological norms rather than trying to sift out what their founding prophet would have wanted them to do. The close proximity of the McCary excommunication and Lewis's marriage likely led Young to think about the role of race and the marriage of whites and blacks. Because he did not have a concrete teaching from Smith to use as precedent, he relied upon his apostles’ (and probably his own) American theological and cultural understandings about mixing blood. In this way, Young reiterated his sole authority to authorize plural marriages and accepted a commonplace theological and social view as Mormon doctrine.

VIII. Cosmological Break: Brigham Young's 1852 Address to the Utah Legislature

Brigham Young did not publicly offer his opinion on excluding Africans from temple priesthood until the winter of 1852. Until recently, however, the context in which he delivered his theological justifications for excluding peoples of African descent from the house of Israel was not clear. Speaking in the context of a territorial legislature debate over forced labor, Young came out strongly in favor of slavery and tied his support to the Curse of Cain. Young lent his weight as both territorial leader and Mormonism's prophet to ensure that Utah's territorial constitution allowed the practice of slavery in pursuit of the privileges of statehood.

The day before his pronouncement, one of Young's apostles, Orson Pratt, opposed legal slavery in Utah and delivered an impassioned speech on the legislature floor to that effect. Pratt stated the saints should not be willing to “bind the African because he is different from us in color.” Such a disregard for human life was “enough to cause the angels in heaven to blush.” Orson Pratt believed God had cursed Cain or Ham but that the curse did not pass down to their children, as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had previously enumerated.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Young's vitriolic response to Orson Pratt followed the logic he and his apostolic predecessors had established nearly a decade before his speech on the floor of the Utah territorial legislature. First, Young set out the terms of a theological justification for African slavery. He then changed the subject and presented a justification for discriminating against people of black African descent in Mormon temple liturgy and cosmology. He declared to the legislature that Cain had becomes jealous of Abel's favor garnered through obedience to God. Cain proceeded to murder Abel and received “that mark on the face the countenance of every African you ever did see.” Young informed his audience that Cain's curse went beyond skin color or other physical markers. Cain's fratricide had represented more than jealousy over a single offering—the first murder had been an attack on all the children that Abel would have sired had he been permitted to live. Because their ancestor had been murdered, Abel's descendants were not liturgically welded to one another through the temple priesthood. Thus, when God cursed Cain, he declared that Cain's descendants (Africans) would not have access to the blessings of the temple priesthood “until the last of [the] posterity of Abel had received the priesthood until the redemption of earth.” Young thundered on: “In [the] kingdom of God on earth a man who has the African blood in him cannot hold one jot nor tittle of priesthood.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Young then declared that if anyone believed “the seed of Cain” should partake of “all the [temple priesthood] blessings” God had extended to those of the Abrahamic covenant, it signified that God had removed the temple priesthood from the Mormon Church. This statement suggests that Young was referring to excluding all peoples of African descent from the temple priesthood, not merely men of African descent from the ecclesiastical priesthood.

Young's speech affirms what he and other apostles had preached in previous years. As supposed descendants of Cain, Africans did not have the right to temple ordinances. Young went further with his exegesis of the first biblical fratricide, declaring Cain had murdered Abel out of jealousy for his obedience. As a result, Cain and his descendants would be barred from the sealing liturgy, including plural marriage, until all of Abel's kin had been sealed to him.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By doing so, Young effectively cut off Africans, whom he believed to be Cain's posterity, from joining the eternal kinship networks made possible through the temple priesthood of Smith's sealing liturgy.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Several historians have framed Young's racial restriction in terms of ecclesiastical priesthood—because men of African descent were not ordained to Mormon priesthood office until 1978. However, this label neglects the women and children of African descent that Young excluded from temple liturgy, especially the sealing ritual, in his racial exegesis. Although not official church policy for more than fifty years, these ecclesiastical and temple restrictions remained in force within the LDS Church for 126 years.

It is essential to remember Young's remarks centered on Africans, who were not considered of the bloodline of Israel, and not those with black skin. Indeed, he declared he had never seen “a white man [or] woman on earth,” acknowledging some humans possessed darker skin but that all descended from the children of Adam.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For more than a century after Young's speech, those with African blood could not hold priesthood offices or become members of Mormonism's eternal kinship network. This seems to suggest a confusion in Mormonism about whether Young referred to ecclesiastical or temple priesthood in his 1852 speech, but the absence of new ordinations is telling. Missionary work among peoples of African descent slowed to a standstill. However, Mormons would continue to proselytize among “black-skinned” Pacific Islanders, East Indians, and South Americans because of their supposed Israelite blood.

Young's “fully enunciated position” rejected Joseph Smith's teaching that men would be “punished for their own sins” and not anyone else's sins or misdeeds.Footnote ¹¹⁰ However, Young attempted to incorporate Smith's doctrine of racial redemption. He taught that after, and only after, Abel's descendants had all been sealed to one another, Cain's progeny could gain access to the same rituals as Abel's family. Through this logic, Young could argue that he remained true—eventually—to Smith's vision of an eternal family of man bound by priesthood rituals and universally free from divine curses of dark skin. Of course, the redemption of Africans would probably come long after Young's death and possibly after the millennium. This strategy echoes Joseph Smith's 1836 actions in relation to Mormon converts of African descent in Missouri. Although both Smith and Young believed in the spiritual and racial redemption of peoples of African descent (albeit with different ideas of when the redemption would take place), they placed the survival of their church and their religious and political beliefs before the salvation and equality of Africans.