A panel discussion at the Tanner Humanities Center on March 4th featured authors of a new historical study that illuminates the complex debates around slavery and unfree labor in early Utah Territory.

The conversation, featuring W. Paul Reeve, Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies and Chair of History at the University of Utah, and Christopher Rich, a PhD student and Army JAG Corps officer, was part of the Center’s renewed partnership with the Mormon Studies Initiative. As Scott Black, Director of the Tanner Humanities Center, noted, “We understand the study of religions and faith traditions is an integral part of the humanities, because they are central to our lives, our history, and our culture.”

The authors discussed their co-authored book, This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle Over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah, written with LeJean Purcell Carruth and published by Oxford University Press. They were joined by Alice Faulkner Burch from the Sema Hadithi African American Heritage and Culture Foundation, and Jordan Watkins, Associate Professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University.

At the heart of the book lies the discovery of a folder of un-transcribed Pittman shorthand documents from the 1852 Utah territorial legislative session. These documents, transcribed by Carruth, reveal previously inaccessible debates about race, religion, and slavery among early territorial leaders.

The book examines how Utah Territory grappled with the question that was dividing the nation: Can human beings be held as property? In Rich’s account, the territorial legislature answered by passing two laws in 1852: one governing relationships between white enslavers and Black enslaved people, and another regulating the indenture of Native children purchased from Ute traffickers.

As Reeve explained, central to the story is the theological and political conflict between Brigham Young and Orson Pratt. Young, as both territorial governor and church president, advocated for a middle path that rejected chattel slavery but established forms of unfree labor reminiscent of those he knew from his youth in New York. Pratt, a territorial legislator and church apostle, took a more radical view, condemning all forms of unfree labor as “this abominable slavery” and arguing for Black male voting rights.

This conflict reveals the ambivalence and complexity of racial, religious, and political thought in early Mormonism. The authors emphasize that these debates reflected broader national tensions while taking on distinctive religious dimensions in Utah. Rich suggested that Young was attempting to create a system that addressed economic realities in Utah, while avoiding the splits over slavery of other American denominations.

Watkins praised the book for challenging simplistic binaries in understanding pre-Civil War America, though he questioned whether Young’s opposition to chattel slavery was more pragmatic than principled. Burch reflected on how the book deepened our understanding of the different forms of unfree labor, and in so doing, demonstrated the importance of examining difficult historical phenomena from all perspectives.

The documents analyzed in This Abominable Slavery are available at thisabominableslavery.org, hosted by the University of Utah. 

The Tanner Humanities Center’s partnership with Mormon Studies also encompasses the Sterling M. McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture, which was established in 1992 to advance academic inquiry into the role of religion in people’s lives.