This is what my research led me to believe. The Mormons in Nauvoo were notorious for voting as a block and they depended on Joseph Smith to tell them who to vote for. Both parties wanted the mormon vote. Smith would use that power and make promises to either party in return for favors for the Mormons.

Smith would swing either way depending on whom he was negotiating with. He was neutral on his own feelings of slavery. He was looking after the welfare of Mormonism and its members....Joseph himself was not a big fan of manual labor....so why not a bit of slavery?

Brigham Young was the leader who made a big deal of negroes and the priesthood after he moved members to Utah. And it just grew from Brigham Young and his speeches.

Yes and no.

JS is the one who turned color into a moral test: the darker, the less virtuous. He also produced the PoGP, which explicitly endorsed "the curse." Sure, he liked a couple of black people and promised one that she could be his servant in heaven, but that doesn't obviate the fact that he provided the doctrinal foundation for mistreatment of "slaves."

BY wasn't so squeamish. He wouldn't allow himself close enough to black people to form an attachment to anyone; he tolerated and personally benefited from slavery in the form of the human being whom Charles Rich paid as tithing to the church.

Was BY worse? Yeah, but it was JS whose God pronounced the priesthood ban. And that was Mormonism's original sin.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/13/2023 03:16AM by Lot's Wife.

Joey was a real piece of work, it's been written that his words changed according to where the 'saints' - church were located North / South.

Add to that his horniness / lust for getting laid as often as possible...

He wanted/ believed in/ utilized slavery
Though he didn't talk about it much
Outside of church

I don’t think there is any accurate history on Joseph Smith. He was either overly praised or extremely hated. I think the historical record is so convoluted it’s not accurate to much reality. Trying to find who the real Joseph Smith was is one crazy rabbit hole to go down into. If anything the whole church was nuts and still is.

Everyone has their fantasies about Joseph.

Part of the reason the Mormons clashed with the people in Missouri is they didn’t see eye to eye on the slavery issue. Of course Missouri sided with the confederacy and the Mormon church was founded and full of mostly Yankees from the northern states.

You've got that partly wrong. It wasn't slavery that offended the neighbors but the block voting.

In fact, the Mormons voted both ways on slavery, one after the other--thereby offending both camps. And when they left for Utah they continued to permit slavery. Most Mormons were either abolitionists or simply didn't own any and hence didn't care.

But there were slaves in Utah, including at least eight working the land of an apostle (Charles Rich) and one whom Rich donated as tithing and who ended up working on Brigham Young's property for a couple of years.

So it's not correct to suggest the church was anti-slavery.

I said PART of the reason. Slavery was an issue and Missouri had internal strife because of it. The church changed a lot under Brigham Young. It really became a different church under him so using Utah as an example is not an accurate comparison.

Really?

Did not the whole church vote for pro-slavery candidates in Missouri when ordered to do so by Joseph Smith? Did JS ever order slave-owning Mormons in the South to free their slaves? Did he instruct Charles Rich to fee his? Did he ever condemn slavery from the pulpit?

Compare BY. He was surely a racist and didn't object to slavery when practiced by the few Mormons who owned slaves, but he never used his overwhelming powers in Utah to give it legal status in that state. Nor did he ever declare from the pulpit that slavery should be legal.

And those abolitionist Northern Yanks you mention as not wanting slavery? They were dominant in the Q15 under both BY and JS and uniformly refrained from criticizing the institution.

There is a straight line between JS's treatment of slavery and BY's. The differences were 1) BY was more explicit in his racism, and 2) he was too cold-hearted to make exceptions for anyone.

Nothing more.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/16/2023 02:35AM by Lot's Wife.

>Compare BY. He was surely a racist and didn't object to slavery when practiced by the few Mormons who owned slaves, but he never used his overwhelming powers in Utah to give it legal status in that state.

Actually, BY did use his powers to legalize slavery in Utah.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/chapter-1-race-slavery-and-freedom-utah-slaves-and-saints.htm

"Speaking before territorial lawmakers in 1852, he made his position on the issue clear, declaring, “I am a firm believer in slavery.” He also maintained that if “a master has a Negro, and uses him well, he is much better off than if he was free.” He further observed that “the Negro in the Southern states are much better treated than the laboring classes of England.” In 1852, Young urged the legislature to adopt “An Act in Relation to Service” which legally recognized the enslavement of black people in the Great Basin."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3639603

"In early 1852, Governor Young asked the legislature to give legal sanction to slavery throughout the territory. Young got what he wanted. On February 4, 1852, Utah became the only territory west of the Missouri River and north of the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30' to legalize slavery."

  
  

Thank you for the enlightenment, [|].

with the situation of communication the way it was then it's no wonder we don't have much documentation about Joe as Rubicon says, so speculation & hearsay reign regarding Joe...

He was 'lucky' in the above sense where we have much more information about Briggy.

Lack of information- documentation created a vacuum.

We have as much information about JS as about almost any of his contemporaries, including some presidents of the United States.

People who assert a lack of documentation for JS either aren't familiar with how history is done or simply haven't bothered to read what is easily available.

  
  

Right you are, Jacq!

from what I'm aware of, most all of the information - documentation about Joe, Briggs, & others has been heavily filtered & edited by ChurchCo & is of only dubious value - accuracy such as the
JS Papers etc.

I certainly could have incomplete info - sources available!!

The big question is how accurate is the documentation? Joseph Smith was a controversial character. A lot of the documentation is biased.

It would be someone looking back at our time and trying to get an accurate picture of who Donald Trump was by looking at court cases and what people wrote about him. He’s everything from a complete despot to the best US president ever.

It’s very difficult to get an answer accurate picture of a very controversial historical figure.

Most history is inaccurate because the victor wants to tell their side of things.

The victor's probability of success increases with his temporal remove. That's why it's so difficult to prove much pro- or con- about Jesus or Mohamed or Buddha but much easier to put together the story of Chinggis Khan, whose rampages left countless records in dozens of different languages. The viewpoints are different and hence present different facets of the same phenomena.

By comparison to any of those figures, JS is a piece of cake. There are newspaper articles, journal entries, court records, speeches, books, contemporaneous statements by friends and enemies, all sorts of documents. There are Spaulding's books and Ethan Smith's histories and histories of the Napoleonic Wars; there are Masonic rituals that tell us an immense amount about the temple and about JS's protean mimicry. All of this is stuff historians consider ideal, for piecing together history is actually easier if the documents are contradictory.

In fact, such contradictions are proof that the "victor" wasn't all that victorious. It's when there's only one story that you have to worry about being deceived.