Brigham Young: Sermon on Race and Slavery

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In the fall of 1859, no one familiar with the American political scene could fail to see the crisis looming before the Republic, though few even then imagined that open civil war would be the result of that crisis. Young's address on the Mormon attitude toward blacks and slavery came less than two weeks before the raid by the abolitionist John Brown on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, intended to spark an uprising among the southern slave population. Although the Mormons in Utah did not hold slaves, Young supported the position of the Democratic Party, which hoped that continuing compromise between the slave and free states could keep the situation under control. In this sermon Young shapes a Mormon position on the issue of race and slavery based on the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

Young begins his sermon by stating his subject as “the intelligence given to the children of men.” His point of departure is the Psalm of the Hebrew Bible: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?… For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.” For Young, this text means that human intelligence is a “great mystery.” He supposes that the nature of human intelligence—in particular, its distribution among individual races of humankind—cannot be understood by rational inquiry but only from revealed scripture. Young, however, rejects the creation myth of the second chapter of Genesis, in which God forms man from earth, deeming it “an idle tale.” He advances instead an idea that is consistent with the Book of Mormon, which holds that God created many planets throughout the universe along with inhabitants for them.

Young, however, goes further: “Mankind are here because they are the offspring of parents who were first brought here from another planet.” The significance of this momentous statement has generally been overlooked. As far as Mormon theology goes, it was Young's original idea. Although it has never been officially incorporated as a Mormon doctrine, Young may have justified the idea as a special revelation to himself, as he reportedly did his belief that the sun and moon were inhabited by creatures similar to human beings. It was not unusual for astronomers in the nineteenth century to put forward the notion either that planets orbited other stars or that planets (including the planets of our solar system) were inhabited and even that life on the earth may have originated elsewhere in the universe. Young may have picked up the idea from popular scientific literature, which already speculated on not only the plurality of worlds but also the existence of extraterrestrial life. Elsewhere in the Journal of Discourses (vol. 11, June 17, 1866, p. 249), Young speaks of God living on another planet. He passes on to a description of how the salvation of human souls depends upon the Mormon founder Joseph Smith, whom Young says now rules over the “celestial kingdom” and the “spirit-world.”

Young then turns to the history of humankind on the earth, which he presents as controlled by the Hebrew patriarch Abraham (whom he conceives as a preexistent figure incarnated on the earth) in much the same way Smith supposedly controls human beings after they depart from the earth. In this way, Young brings the discussion back around to his original subject of racial differences in intelligence. Humankind is divided into the various races based on skin color (a pseudoscientific concept almost universally embraced in the nineteenth century), which in turn is based on particular events described in the biblical book of Genesis. In this way blacks have become different from the other races. “You see some classes of the human family … are black, uncouth, un-comely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.” Young claims that blacks are the descendants of individuals cursed by God for their sins. In the first instance, the descendants of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve whom God punished for the murder of his brother, Abel, were cursed with “the flat nose and black skin.” Following the biblical Flood, after which all of the human race descended from Noah, this curse is continued on blacks, who are now also given a second curse, that of being slaves by nature. This doubtless refers to Noah's son Ham, who was cursed by God for seeing his father's nakedness and who was widely accepted in Christian thought as the ancestor of the inhabitants of Africa.

This discourse is related to the theological position of blacks within Mormonism. Joseph Smith had ordained blacks to the Mormon priesthood (meaning admittance to the church as an ordinary member, since all male Mormons are held to be priests) and even as elders. But in 1849 Young had become so outraged when he learned that a black Mormon elder, Enoch Lewis, had married a white Mormon woman that he publicly stated he would kill them both if he could. Young then ruled that no black could hold the Mormon priesthood, citing the mark of Cain as the justification. This effectively excluded blacks from equal participation within the LDS Church. The views of this sermon also position Mormonism in terms of the national controversy over slavery. If blacks are inherently inferior (not only to whites but to Native Americans and other races as well) and are cursed by God with the condition of slavery, the efforts of the abolitionists are not only misguided but indeed blasphemous because they are working against God's will. As Young says, blacks “should be the ‘servant of servants’; and they will be, until that curse is removed; and the Abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree.” This removal of the curse will come about only after all the other races have been completely converted to Mormonism. This sermon suggests that Young, as a national political figure, was content to tolerate the institution of slavery as a means of preserving the Union.

Young's views on race, abhorrent as they seem today, were not far from the mainstream views of his contemporaries, even among abolitionists. They closely echo, for example, words Abraham Lincoln used in debates with Stephen Douglas, his opponent in the campaign for a seat in the Illinois Senate in 1858. Additionally, Thomas Huxley, a staunch supporter of abolition and, after Charles Darwin, the world's leading evolutionary biologist, constantly tried to debunk pseudoscientific attempts to deny that blacks were less than full human beings. Even Huxley, though, did not accept the full equality of the races but insisted that blacks were physically inferior, with smaller brains than whites, though he did not consider this to be a justification for slavery.

Young, then, used Mormon theology to defend slavery, a position usually found only among southern apologists. It was not held even by the great Democratic compromiser Stephen Douglas, who believed that slavery depended on the right of states to make their own laws rather than on the innate characteristics of blacks. Young's views on race, entrenched by his authority as LDS prophet, held sway in Mormonism far into the twentieth century.