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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 August 2021
This article examines the first Mormon mission to Jamaica in January 1853. The missionaries, facing opposition from both black and white Jamaicans, returned to the United States after only a month on the island, having made only four converts. Latter-day Saints did not return to Jamaica for another 125 years. Drawing on the missionaries’ personal papers, church archives, local newspaper reports, and governmental records, I argue that the 1853 mission played a crucial role in shaping nineteenth-century Mormonism's racial theology, including the “temple and priesthood ban” that restricted priesthood ordination and temple worship for black men and women. While historians have rightly noted the role twentieth-century missions to regions of the African Diaspora played in ending the ban, studies of the racial restriction's early scope have been discussed in almost exclusively American contexts. The mission to Jamaica, precisely because of its failure, helped shape the ban's implementation and theological justifications. Failing to make any inroads, the elders concluded that both Jamaica and its inhabitants were cursed and not worthy of the missionaries’ time, which anticipated later decisions to prioritize preaching to whites and to scale back and ultimately abandon efforts to proselytize people of African descent.
I would like to thank the students in my Missions and Missionaries in American History seminar in winter 2018 for first raising the questions that prompted this research, especially Rachel Felt, who subsequently assisted with some of the research. I received helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the paper from participants at the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship's brownbag lunch workshop; from Melissa Inouye at the 2019 meeting of the Mormon History Association; from Tisa Wenger at the 2020 meeting of the American Society of Church History; and from Benjamin Park, Paul Reeve, Molly Perry, Kristina Poznan, Laurel Daen, Rebecca de Schweinitz, Matthew Mason, Amy Harris, and Jenny Pulsipher, as well as from the journal's editors and anonymous reviewers. William Allred provided research assistance at the National Archives, Mark Haskell assisted in reading through microfilm copies of Jamaican newspapers, and the staffs at Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library and the Church History Library in Salt Lake City helped in locating relevant source material.
1 Aaron F. Farr Diary, September 15, 1852; December 20, 1852; January 9–10, 1853, Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL). Elder is an ecclesiastical office in the lay Mormon priesthood and a title assumed by full-time missionaries and many church leaders. I use missionaries and elders interchangeably throughout the essay.
2 On Brigham Young's ascent to leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the wake of Joseph Smith's death, see John Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 80–174. On Utah in the 1850s, see Brent M. Rogers, Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
3 “Minutes of a Special Conference of the Elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints, assembled in the Tabernacle, Great Salt Lake City, August 28th, 1852,” Deseret News, September 18, 1852.
4 See Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), 239–63.
5 Brigham Young, Speech to the Utah Territorial Legislature, February 5, 1852, Papers of George D. Watt (transcribed from Pitman shorthand by LaJean Purcell Carruth), CHL. Although Young's 1852 speech was the first documented public announcement of the restriction, there is evidence that the ban was implemented earlier. During John Gunnison's tour of Salt Lake City in 1849–1850, he noted that Latter-day Saints believed that the “Negro is cursed as to the priesthood.” See John W. Gunnison, The Mormons, or Latter-day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake (Philadelphia: Lippincott and Grambo, 1852), 51. For a fuller discussion of the beginnings of the racial restriction, see W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 142–61; and Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 30–40.
6 The 1844 census recorded 293,128 black Jamaicans, 68,529 “coloured,” and just 15,776 white persons. Combined, the “black” and “colored” populations made up 95.8 percent of the island's inhabitants. See John Bigelow, Jamaica in 1850: Or, The Effects of Sixteen Years of Freedom on a Slave Colony, with an introduction by Robert J. Scholnick (New York, 1851; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 40.
7 On Protestant missions to postemancipation Jamaica, see Gale L. Kenny, Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834–1866 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).
8 The historiography of Mormonism and the racial restriction is rich and growing. See Newell G. Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People within Mormonism, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2018); Harris and Bringhurst, The Mormon Church and Blacks; Armand L. Mauss, All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Max Perry Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); and Reeve, Religion of a Different Color. Although each of these volumes posits the importance of Mormon missions in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa as central to the ban's eventual end, none of them considers the influence of earlier Mormon missions on the scope and shape of the ban's earliest incarnations. Even Russell W. Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830–2013 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014), discusses the restriction's beginnings in a solely American context.
9 Aaron Farr to George A. Smith and Robert L. Campbell, June 2, 1865, Missionary Reports, 1864–1865, CHL.
10 On Protestant “hierarchies of heathenism,” see Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
11 On Protestant biblical interpretation and understandings of race, see Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
12 Farr Diary, January 15, 1853; Farr to Smith and Campbell, June 2,1865, CHL.
13 Farr Diary, CHL. Among those they met were William Wemyss Anderson, a well-known lawyer and insurance agent with strong ties to the United States, Thomas Stewart, Kingston's Anglican Rector, and Julius Beardslee, a Congregational missionary from the United States who had lived in Jamaica since 1838.
14 Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch (Kingston), January 13, 1853.
15 Farr Diary, January 13, 1853; Farr to Smith and Campbell, June 2, 1865, CHL.
16 Farr Diary, January 15, 1853, CHL
17 Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch, January 13, 1853.
18 Farr Diary, January 15, 1853, CHL. On Harrison's tenure in Jamaica, which began in 1831, just one year after Joseph Smith organized the Church of Christ and before slavery was abolished in Jamaica, see Rugemer, Edward B., “Robert Monroe Harrison, British Abolition, Southern Anglophobia and Texas Annexation,” Slavery and Abolition 28, no. 2 (2007): 169–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rugemer, Edward B., “The Harrisons Go to Jamaica: Race and Sexual Violence in the Age of Abolition,” Journal of Family History 33, no. 1 (January 2008): 13–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 T. F. Pilgrim to Robert Monroe Harrison, January 18, 1853, Consular Posts—Kingston, Jamaica, Records of Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Record Group 84, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.
20 Farr Diary, January 18, 1853, CHL.
21 William Clunes to the Editor, Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch, January 19, 1853.
22 Clunes to the Editor, Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch.
23 Farr Diary, January 20, 1853, CHL
24 Farr Diary, January 23, 1853, CHL.
25 Farr to Young, December 16, 1853, CHL.
26 James Brown to Brigham Young, February 1853, Brigham Young Incoming Correspondence, 1839–1877, Brigham Young Office Files, CHL.
27 Brown had previously filled mission assignments to the southern states and California. See “James Brown,” Early Mormon Missionaries database, https://history.lds.org/missionary/individual/james-brown-1801 (accessed August 1, 2018).
28 Brown to Young, February 1853, CHL.
29 Farr to Smith and Campbell, June 2, 1865, CHL.
30 Farr to Young, December 16, 1853, CHL.
31 Farr Diary, January 25, 1853; Farr to Young, December 16, 1853; Joseph Piercy Smith, Frederick John Smith, and Richard Hollywood to Brigham Young, April 25, 1854, Brigham Young Incoming Correspondence, 1839–1877, CHL.
32 Farr Diary, January 26–February 4, 1853; Farr to Young, December 16, 1853, CHL.
33 Farr Diary, February 5, 1853; Farr to Young, December 16, 1853; Brown to Young, February 1853, CHL. An outbreak of Yellow Fever was then sweeping the West Indies. For a first-person account of the epidemic in Jamaica, see Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, ed. William L. Andrews (London, 1857; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 59–73. The Fever would eventually reach New Orleans, where it would claim nearly eight thousand lives. See John Duffy, Sword of Pestilence: The New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966); and McKiven, Henry M. Jr., “The Political Construction of a Natural Disaster: The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853,” Journal of American History 94 (December 2007): 734–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Brown to Young, February 1853, CHL.
35 Farr to Young, December 16, 1853; Farr Diary, February 4–11, 1853; Smith, Smith, and Hollywood to Young, April 25, 1854, CHL. A transcription of the letter, along with biographical overviews of each convert, is included in Jones, Christopher Cannon and Felt, Rachel, “‘The religion is assailed by most in the Country’: A Letter from the First Mormon Converts in Jamaica, 1854,” Mormon Historical Studies 20, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 111–27Google Scholar.
36 “Minutes of a Special Conference of the Elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints, assembled in the Tabernacle, Great Salt Lake City, August 28th, 1852,” Deseret News, 18 September 1852.
37 Patty B. Sessions Diary, August 29, 1852, as published in Patty Bartlett Sessions, Mormon Midwife: The 1846–1888 Diaries of Patty Bartlett Sessions, ed. Donna Toland Smith (Logan: Utah State University Press), 179; Revelation, Nauvoo, IL, July 12, 1843, Revelations Collection, CHL, available online at http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-12-july-1843-dc-132/1 (accessed May 20, 2018).
38 On the beginnings of Mormon polygamy, see Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton/Liveright, 2020). On polygamy's expansion and transformation in nineteenth-century Utah, see Kathryn M. Daynes, More Wives Than One: The Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
39 Hosea Stout Journal, August 29, 1852, as published in Hosea Stout, On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 1844–1889, ed. Juanita Brooks (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press and Utah State Historical Society, 1964), 449–50. On the experiences of those missionaries sent around the globe to preach the revelation on plural marriage, see chapter 10 in Ulrich, A House Full of Females, 239–63. Ulrich calculated that twenty-five of the eighty-two missionaries for whom marital information is available were married to at least two women. See Ulrich, A House Full of Females, 440n13.
40 Jesse Turpin married Eliza Ann Boggess in Harrison, West Virginia, in December 1840. In August 1846, shortly before setting out for Utah, he was married to Jane Louisa Smith in Nauvoo, Illinois. Alfred B. Lambson married Melissa Jane Bigler in March 1845 and, subsequently, married Nancy Ann Keller in Caldwell, Missouri, on April 18, 1852, just months before his departure to Jamaica. The two would divorce shortly after Lambson returned to Utah in 1855. Although married to only one woman each at the time of their mission to Jamaica, both Aaron Farr and Darwin Richardson would subsequently marry additional women. James Brown and Elijah Thomas, the two missionaries who joined the others in Jamaica in late January, were both polygamists. Brown, in fact, was married to seven women at the time of his mission to the West Indies. All information from Nauvoo Community Project database, Center for Family History and Genealogy, Brigham Young University, available online at http://nauvoo.byu.edu/ (accessed March 1, 2020).
41 Farr to Young, December 16, 1853, CHL; Clunes to the Editor, Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch, January 19, 1853.
42 Ulrich, A House Full of Females, 240.
43 Malcolm R. Thorp, “Sectarian Violence in Early Victorian Britain: The Mormon Experience, 1837–1860,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 70 (Autumn 1988): 139. Spencer Fluhman similarly notes that the public acknowledgement of polygamy transformed anti-Mormonism in America into a “widespread political obsession.” See J. Spencer Fluhman, “A Peculiar People:” Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 151n21.
44 Farr to Smith and Campbell, June 2, 1865, CHL; Farr to Young, December 16, 1853, CHL.
45 Polygamy was viewed by white Jamaicans as a heathen remnant of West African society and used it as evidence of “black female debasement.” See Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 1, 20–21, 86, 96–98. On the policing of black women's reproduction and bodies by slave owners, doctors, and abolitionists, see Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2017). For colonial officials’ ongoing interest in black women's reproduction after emancipation, see Juanita De Barros, Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2014. On the politics of polygamy and slavery more broadly, see Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Polygamy: An Early American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 115–49.
46 Claudius K. Fergus, Revolutionary Emancipation: Slavery and Abolitionism in the British West Indies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 9–11. In the 1850s, critics pointed to the Mormon embrace of polygamy as evidence of their racial inferiority and unfitness for the American body politic. See Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 229–30.
47 As cited in Fergus, Revolutionary Emancipation, 48. In earlier decades, some enslaved African converts to Christianity in the Caribbean pushed back against efforts to reform their polygynous unions. See Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 184–87.
48 John Jay, The Progress and Results of Emancipation in the English West Indies (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1842), 27. See also Melanie J. Newton, The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). Political leaders contributed to the cause, passing antibigamy laws in an attempt to legislate black family arrangements in accord with Victorian familial ideals. See Jenny J. Jemmott, Ties That Bind: The Black Family in Post-Slavery Jamaica, 1834–1882 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2015), 20, 168–91.
49 Fergus, Revolutionary Emancipation, 10. On the sexual violence in Jamaica, see Turner, Contested Bodies, 215–18.
50 On the Hyde controversy, see Fuller, Barbara, “Christian Morality in ‘Heathen’ Jamaica: The American Missionary Association and the Case of Dr. Hyde, 1847–1858,” Journal of Caribbean History 36, no. 2 (2002): 228–42Google ScholarPubMed; and Kenny, Contentious Liberties, 117–28.
51 Farr Diary, January 12, 1853, CHL.
52 As cited in Fuller, “Christian Morality in ‘Heathen’ Jamaica,” 232.
53 T. F. Pilgrim to William Clunes, January 17, 1853, in Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch, January 19, 1853.
54 Farr to Smith Campbell, June 2, 1865, CHL; Farr Diary, January 19, 1853, CHL.
55 Brown to Young, February 1853, CHL. James Brown was born in Rowan County, North Carolina, in 1801. After converting to Mormonism and moving to Illinois, he was called to return south on a preaching mission to Alabama and Mississippi. See “James Brown,” Early Mormon Missionaries database, https://history.lds.org/missionary/individual/james-brown-1801 (accessed August 6, 2018).
56 Farr to Smith and Campbell, June 2, 1865, CHL.
57 Galatians 3:28 (King James Version); Smith, Book of Mormon, 72,108 [2 Nephi 5:21, 2 Nephi 26:33]. The page numbers refer to the first edition of the Book of Mormon, published in 1830. Bracketed references are to the chapters and verses in the Book of Mormon today. Max Mueller has referred to the book's racial theology as one of “white universalism.” See Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 34–35.
58 Mauss, All Abraham's Children, 26–29; Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 94, 109–11.
59 On early Mormon missions to French Polynesia, see R. Lanier Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea: A History of Latter–day Saints in the Pacific (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1986), 3–7; Amanda Hendrix–Komoto, “‘Playing the Whore’: The Domestic and Sexual Politics of Mormon Missionary Work on Tahiti Nui and in the Tuamotus,” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 3 (July 2015): 58–96.
60 Both cited in Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, “Assembling Bodies and Souls: Missionary Practices on the Pacific Frontier,” in Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965, ed. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 67.
61 Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism, 20–21.
62 On Black Pete, see Mark Lyman Staker, Hearken, O Ye People: The Historical Setting of Joseph Smith's Ohio Revelations (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2009), 5–9, 27–34, 77–81. On Able, see Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 95–98, 126–28. On Manning, see Quincy D. Newell, Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); and Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 5–7, 119–52.
63 “General Assembly,” Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate (Kirtland, Ohio), August 1835. The proclamation was included in the 1835 compilation of Joseph Smith's revelations. See “Of Governments and Laws in General,” Section 102 in Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints: Carefully Selected from the Revelations of God, and Compiled by Joseph Smith Junior, Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, Frederick G. Williams (Kirtland, OH: F. G. Williams and Co., 1835), 252–54.
64 Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 117–25. On Protestant missions to enslaved African Americans, see Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity, 169–209.
65 Farr Diary, January 23, 1853, CHL.
66 Farr Diary, January 28, 1853, January 30, 1853, CHL; Farr to Smith and Campbell, June 2, 1865, CHL; Farr to Young, December 16, 1853, CHL. On creole lodging houses in Jamaica, see Paulette Kerr, “Victims or Strategists? Female Lodging-House Keepers in Jamaica,” in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 197–212.
67 Farr Diary, January 28, 1853, CHL.
68 Farr to Young, December 16, 1853, CHL.
69 Farr Diary, January 21, 1853, January 29, 1853, January 31, 1853, CHL.
70 Maffly-Kipp, “Assembling Bodies and Souls,” 67; Parley P. Pratt, Proclamation! To the People of the Coasts and Islands of the Pacific; of Every Nation, Kindred and Tongue (Sydney, Australia: C. W. Wandell, 1851), 4.
71 Alfred Lambson to George A. Smith, August 12, 1854, George A. Smith Papers, 1834–1877, CHL.
72 Farr to Young, December 16, 1853, CHL. For the parable of the sheep and goats, see Matt. 25:31–46 (King James Version).
73 Farr Diary, January 23, 1853, CHL; Farr to Young, December 16, 1853, CHL. Although still very much legible, part of Farr's journal entry for January 23 is crossed out with a large X.
74 Farr to Young, December 16, 1853, CHL; Farr Diary, January 23, 1853, CHL.
75 Brown to Young, February 1853, CHL.
76 Alfred Lambson, Remarks in Salt Lake City Tabernacle, October 15, 1854, Historian's Office General Church Minutes, 1839–1877, CHL; Lambson to Smith, August 12, 1854, CHL.
77 Darwin K. Richardson, The Pre-Existence of Man in the Eternal World: His First and Second Estate in Connexion with the Plurality of Wives: Shewing the Celestial Law and Order of Marriage and Generation as Was Ordained of God (n.p., 1853?), 7. A photocopy of the only known copy of the pamphlet, missing its title page, is at the CHL.
78 Farr to Smith and Campbell, June 2, 1865, CHL.
79 Lambson to Smith, August 12, 1854, CHL.
80 On the ban's early dissemination, see Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 156–61. The Church-owned Deseret News did publish a brief announcement in April 1852.
81 “Historian's Office, History of the Church, 1839–1882,” January–December 1853, CHL; Lambson, Remarks in Salt Lake City Tabernacle, October 15, 1854, CHL; Darwin Richardson, Remarks, in “Minutes of Meeting,” October 1, 1854, Historian's Office General Church Minutes, 1839–1877, CHL. When B. H. Roberts, in his capacity as Assistant Church Historian, drew on the manuscript history kept by Smith and other predecessors in the Church Historian's Office to write a “comprehensive history of the church” in the early twentieth century, he omitted any reference to the Jamaican elders’ preaching to black Jamaicans at all. In much the same way that church leaders of the era revised historical narratives to insist that the temple and priesthood ban had been a policy first implemented by Joseph Smith, they now revised their history to exclude even the mention of preaching to African-descended peoples. Roberts was sure, however, to conclude his brief overview of the “West Indies Mission” by noting that “two of [the missionaries] were shot by a negro.” See Roberts, Brigham H., “History of the Mormon Church,” Americana 8 (1913), 367Google Scholar. In his 1930 revision of the Americana articles published as the multivolume Comprehensive History of the Church, Roberts inserted one word to clarify that “two of them were shot at by a negro.” See B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930), 4:75.
82 Jesse Haven to Franklin D. Richards, May 13, 1856, in Latter-Day Saints’ Millennial Star, June 7, 1856; Amos Milton Musser to Franklin D. Richards, May 8, 1855, in Latter-Day Saints’ Millennial Star, September 1, 1855; and Robert Skelton to E. T. Benson, June 30, 1856, in Latter-Day Saints’ Millennial Star, September 27, 1856. Despite the failures of missions to Asia and the racist justifications offered by missionaries, they still held out hope for future conversions there. See Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, 125–33.
83 Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 208–10. Estimates for the number of black converts to Mormonism in the nineteenth century have recently expanded, thanks to the efforts of researchers at the Century of Black Mormons database. Their findings also reveal that African-descended people continued to convert to Mormonism in the early twentieth century, even as the transition to a general avoidance of preaching to black people solidified. “Discover the Many Histories of Black Mormons,” J. Willard Marriott Library, http://centuryofblackmormons.org/ (accessed September 1, 2018).
84 Brigham H. Roberts, “To the Youth of Israel” (1885), in Harris and Bringhurst, The Mormon Church and Blacks, 50; Richardson, The Pre-Existence of Man, 7.
85 Paul Reeve has framed the emergence of the premortal explanation for Mormonism's racial restriction as being facilitated by a “subtle shift” from Hyde's language of “neutrality” to Roberts's introduction of “less valiant.” Richardson's 1853 argument suggests, however, that the language of valiance was present much earlier than Roberts's 1885 writings. See Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 208, 255.
86 See Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness, 73–104.