THE CURSE AND REDEMPTION OF THE LAMANITES: SALVATION BI-RACE ALONE
“Are the Mormons abolitionists?” No, unless delivering the people from priest-craft, and the priests from the power of Satan, should be considered abolition. But we do not believe in setting the negroes free…. “Do they [Mormons] stir up the Indians to war, and to commit depredations?” No.
Civilization is simply the spirit of improvement, in learning and civil matters…. These natives belong to the house of Israel … but through their forefathers transgressed the law of God … until the whole race has sunk deep into barbarism…. The Lord has taken from this race any disposition for improvement even to this day.
UNTIL VERY RECENTLY (1978), the LDS Church refused to ordain men of African lineage to the Mormon priesthood. The priesthood includes the offices (degrees, in effect) of deacon, teacher, and priest (the lesser, or Aaronic, priesthood) and elder, seventy, and high priest (the higher, or Melchizedek, priesthood). These standard-issue and exclusively male appointments are essentially administrative. More problematic by far is the fact that the priesthood ban kept African men and women from going through the temple and being sealed as husband and wife for time and all eternity (the highest and most solemn of the LDS liturgical requirements). Temple marriage qualifies one for the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom in Mormon thought, and thus before 1978 only a select group of white Mormon men and women were eligible. At the same time, people of color were always welcome to enter the celestial kingdom through a backdoor of sorts—baptized into the church and unto repentance in this life—but were considered the stuff of angels, not of gods per se. In 1978, when President Spencer W. Kimball demonstrated great courage, according to some, and suspended the practices excluding African Americans, this all changed—in principle, at least. In fact, more than twenty years has passed with no great influx of people of African descent into the church or through the temple.
The change in policy was due in part to the brave efforts of a coterie of Mormon intellectuals who argued that the priesthood ban had no doctrinal basis and was a custom rather than divine decree. Still, Kimball made no apologies or canonical reparations for a genealogical prejudice that had (inadvertently?) led to discrimination,1 adroitly adding blacks to the roster without giving up the major scriptural source for black inferiority in Mormonism—the Book of Abraham. Not unlike the repeal of polygamy, the suspension of the priesthood ban can be seen as a kind of necessary evil to avoid causing the church’s mission to the “Lamanites” in Latin America and the massive influx of red-black and black-red peoples into the church at that time to come to a screeching halt.2 Before becoming the church’s president, Kimball had worked tirelessly as an apostle, the “mission to the Lamanites” among his chief responsibilities and loves. The suspension of the priesthood ban, then, was a corollary of Kimball’s lifelong interest and sincere desire to revitalize the Mormon mission to native peoples as outlined in the Book of Mormon, not an attempt to initiate a Mormon-led reclamation of the inhabitants of Africa and their descendants for its own sake.
Mormon historians more or less agree that such discriminatory practices contravened the spirit of the Book of Mormon. As Newell G. Bringhurst explains in his seminal Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, “Mormon racist concepts as articulated in the Books of Moses and Abraham represent a ‘harder’ Mormon line against blacks than that earlier assumed toward the Indians in the Book of Mormon.”3 Whether the Book of Mormon discussion of the redemption of the Lamanites has anything to do with or say about the so-called Negro question is in some respects the issue. Indeed, some African-American converts to Mormonism, as Jessie Embry points out, take exception to the curse of the Lamanites, seeing in it a covert antiblack statement.4 Mormons of native descent object to being called Lamanites for perhaps the same reason.5 Elder George P. Lee, the first Native American General Authority in the Mormon church, was excommunicated for heresy when he attempted to turn the Book of Mormon on its head and suggest that red, not white, was the Deity’s color of choice—the implication being that Mormonism had been co-opted by Caucasians. The Reverend Diedrich Willers of the German Reformed Church was among the first to detect a hidden anti-African agenda in the Book of Mormon, in part because of its many allusions to the biblical proslavery argument (the story in Genesis 9:21–27 where Noah, “after sleeping off a drunken stupor, placed a ‘curse’ on his grandson Canaan.”6 Indeed, Willers concluded that the Book of Mormon was a thinly veiled discussion of the origin of blacks.7
The Lord instructs Nephi, for example, that should Laman and Lemuel, his older brothers, rebel against him, he “will curse them even with a sore curse, and they shall have no power over [his] seed.”8 Later, “the Lord God did cause a skin of darkness to come upon them.” “Cursed”—appearing, in all its forms, eighty-one times—and “mark”—which appears eleven times—allude to verses 11 and 15 of Genesis 4: “And now are thou cursed … and the LORD set a mark upon Cain.” Nephites who “mix with the Lamanites” are said to become “wicked, and wild, and ferocious” (p. 413). The red-black race of Amlicites in the Book of Mormon is a case in point. “Amlicites,” the book says, “were distinguished from the Nephites, for they had marked themselves with red … after the manner of the Lamanites…. And it came to pass that whosoever did mingle his seed with that of the Lamanites, did bring the same curse upon his seed.” Dark skin is the certain fate of all whites in the narrative who “suffer [themselves] to be led away by the Lamanites” (p. 228). The first such cursing and/or marking—that of Nephi’s wicked brothers and their posterity—consists of a black skin, moreover. The Book of Mormon is quite clear about this, too. “And behold, they were cut off from his presence. And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint,” Nephi explains, “wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, therefore the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them” (p. 73).
Willers’s contention that a virulent anti-Africanism colored the Book of Mormon discussion of Indian origins—so much so that black and red are indistinguishable in the text—jibes with the findings of a recent linguistic-historical study. In his book Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, Jack D. Forbes points out that whites have tended to presume that red-black and black-red peoples (largely because of their color) are shades of black and thus African at bottom.9 White-black and black-white fall prey to the same color prejudice, especially in the United States, where the belief has always been strong that a single drop of African blood is all it takes to render one a direct descendant of the biblical Canaan (p. 261).
Like many at the time, Smith believed strongly in the biblical-literalist defense of slavery.10 Abolitionists, in his opinion, were guilty of attempting to halt a scheme that had the blessing of heaven. The gospel, as Paul preached it, only promised spiritual liberation. To enjoin slaves to leave their masters was thus a distortion.11 In 1835 he issued a public statement in defense of black servitude:
We believe it just to preach the gospel to the nations of the earth and warn the righteous to save themselves from the corruptions of the world; but we do not believe it right to interfere with bondage of servants neither preach the gospel to, nor baptize them, contrary to the will and wish of their masters, nor to meddle with or influence them in the least to be dissatisfied with their situations in this life thereby jeopardizing the lives of men. Such interference we believe to be unlawful and dangerous to the peace of every government allowing human beings to be held in servitude.12
Likewise in 1838, in response to the question “Are the Mormons abolitionists?” Smith responded to the contrary.13 He attacked abolitionism as the work of a “hireling pseudo priesthood,”14 proffering a colonization scheme, instead.15 His followers took it for granted that the Book of Mormon reflected similar views. Parley P. Pratt, an early disciple of Mormonism, defended Smith’s translation of a set of metal plates from Kinderhook, Ohio (a hoax it turns out),16 allegedly “filled with engravings in Egyptian language and”—of importance to this discussion—“the genealogy of one of the ancient Jaredites back to Ham the son of Noah.”17
The apostate priesthood makes the journey to America by Jaredite ark. This much is clear. Implicit is the notion that the seed of Canaan either stowed away in a cargo bay or, more likely, on the arm of some unsuspecting or recalcitrant Jaredite husband. With so many parallels to the Noachian story, that the seed of Africa or apostate priesthood (they are one and the same, it seems) boards yet another ark (through the bonds of holy matrimony, perhaps) might go without saying. This, at least, is consistent with the Mormon belief in the African ancestry of Ham’s wife, that “the curse of Canaan” was, in effect, more biological than supernatural in origin—dark skin the punishment for marrying outside the race, the children taking on the hue of the apostate priesthood.18 Likewise, “the curse of Cain” is blamed on a “Satan-worshiping wife” of foreign ancestry.19 Although Mormons toe the monogenetic line, rejecting out of hand the polygenetic theory of the pre-Adamite races (black, brown, red, and yellow), there is an unavoidable latent polygenesis with regard to Cain’s wife. Sanford Porter, an early convert to Mormonism, thought she must have been of pre-Adamite stock (black, in other words): “I have read some in the Qeoran [sic], the mahometan [sic] bible, that gives an account of nations of people, that dwelt on earth, three thousand years before adam [sic]….It may be so, it [does not contradict] what is written in the bible. Cain, after he slew his brother[,] flew from his father, and mother to a distant land [where] it seems he found some nation, of people, for himself a wife.”20 Cain’s first mistake, it seems, was not the murder of Abel but falling in with the wrong crowd—a band of murderers who get their hooks into him with the considerable help of a (beautiful?) woman.
Smith’s Inspired Version (the first chapters published separately as the Book of Moses) contradicts Porter. Cain’s wife is said to be the daughter of one of his brethren (Gen. 5:12). At the same time, she is a lover of Satan (Gen. 5:13). Cain gives himself to a woman before giving himself to Satan. Cain’s pact with the devil in Smith’s Inspired Version is a Masonic raising: “And Satan said unto Cain, Swear unto me by thy throat, and if thou tell it thou shalt die; and swear thy brethren by their heads, and by the living God, that they tell it not; for if they tell it; for if they tell it they shall surely die…. And all these things were done in secret. And Cain said, Truly I am Mahan, the master of this great secret, that I may murder and get gain. Wherefore Cain was called Master Mahan” (Gen. 5:14–16).
Only afterward does Cain murder Abel. In fact, the murder of Abel is patterned after the murder of Hiram Abiff. Cain, we are told, “was shut out from the presence of the Lord” (Gen. 5:26), and it is not until he removes himself “east of Eden” (Africa) that he “knows” his wife and they conceive a son. “For, from the days of Cain,” it says, “there was a secret combination, and their works were in the dark, and they knew every man his brother” (Gen. 5:37).
These passages in the Inspired Version (coming on the heels of the Book of Mormon) offer a rare glimpse into the mind of Smith on the Morgan slaying. Terming Cain “Master Mahan” (Master Mason) can be seen as a none-too-subtle jab at the Masons of Smith’s day. An apocryphal story of the elevation of Lamech to “Master Mahan” and the murder of Irad (a brother) at his hand for revealing the secrets of the society to “the sons of Adam” seems all too Morganesque to be mere coincidence. “And Irad, the son of Enoch [Cain’s firstborn], having known their secret, began to reveal it unto the sons of Adam; wherefore. Lamech, being angry, slew him, not like unto Cain his brother Abel for the sake of getting gain; but he slew him for the oath’s sake” (Gen. 5:36). What is more, the Masonry to which Lamech is party does not involve women of questionable virtue since “the secrets of the society” are exclusively the domain of males. Lamech does confide in his wives about his role in the murder of Irad, but they are not privy to the secret pact with Satan that, the text says, “began to spread among all the sons of men. And it was among the sons of men. Among the daughters of men, these things were not spoken” (Gen. 5:39–40). One detects a hint of anti-Evangelical polemic, too, when it says that Lamech’s wives “rebelled against him, and declared these things abroad and had not compassion” (Gen. 5:40).
In the chapter that follows, Adam knows Eve, and she gives birth to Seth, “another seed instead of Abel whom Cain slew” (Gen. 6:3) and thus the one and only conduit of the true and everlasting priesthood. A book of remembrance is kept (the lost book?), written in a language that is “pure and undefiled” and containing, among its many inspired passages, a genealogical record of a “pure and undefiled” priesthood line reaching back to Adam. The story of the descendants of Cain and Seth in the Inspired Version accords with the Book of Mormon pattern of protracted race war ending in genocide for the white, or Adamic, faction. More important, Chapter 7 of Smith’s Book of Genesis contains a number of important clues to his understanding of the curse of Canaan myth in relation to Enoch’s vision of the “people of Cainan.” Purposively ambiguous, Cainan can be seen as a clever pun (the sort of phonetic double entendre the Mormon prophet loved to read far too much into), a conflation of the mark of Cain and curse of Canaan. In other words, the curse of Canaan reaches all the way back to Cain, the first apostate Master Mason, whose raising was presided over by the blackest of black Grand Masters, Satan himself. However, the land is cursed by the Deity following the extermination of the “people of Shum” by the Cainanites, and so the Lord “curse[d] the land with much heat … and a blackness came upon all the children of Cainan, that they were despised among all the people” (Gen. 7:9–10). Enoch is told to preach repentance, but not to the people of Cainan.
On first reading, this clearly supports the thesis that the curse of the Lamanites falls squarely on the side of environmentalism, or monogenesis, the whelp of rank antebellum speculation of the best-intentioned anthropological and philo-Semitic kind: the theory of the Hebraic origin of the American Indians. In fact, Enoch’s vision of the extermination of the Shumites in Smith’s Inspired Version can be seen as a thinly veiled allusion to the people of Zeniff in the Book of Mormon, which begins with an invasion of dark peoples from the north against the light-skinned Nephites:
And it came to pass that king Laman died, and his son began to reign in his stead. And he began to stir his people up in rebellion against my people; therefore, they began to prepare for war, and to come up to battle against my people.—But I having sent my spies out round about the land of Shemlon, that I might discover their preparations, that I might guard against them, that they might not come upon my people and destroy them. And it came to pass that they came up upon the north of the land of Shilom, with their numerous hosts.21
The Book of Mormon and Inspired Version, if taken together, suggest that Smith clearly assumed that environment (climate) was a factor in the metamorphosis from white to black—from Adamite to Cainite and from Nephite to Lamanite. However, because the Deity curses the land with a scorching heat, which in turn causes the skin of unrighteous men and women to turn black, forcing them underground and indenturing them to their surroundings, a degree of supernaturalism is also involved. This may explain why the early Mormon missionary to Palestine, Orson Hyde, dedicated the Holy land but not its erstwhile chosen people to the restored gospel. Are we to infer that the early Mormon resistance to proselyting Jews had something to do with them being seen as adopted sons and daughters of Cain? If so, then perhaps the news is not entirely bad, for like unto the Lamanites, they, too, are offered a last chance to return to their former priesthood and thus racial glory, to become as it were a “white and delightsome” people as a result of changes in temperament and temperature. Indeed, the early Mormon mission to the Lamanites and its latent environmentalism might be said to have a ripple effect.22
The best work on the subject is still Dan Vogel’s 1986 book, Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon, taking its cue from a host of controversial writings, early Mormon apostle and apologist B. H. Roberts’ Studies of the Book of Mormon among them.23 Roberts asks the question whether “an investigator of the Book of Mormon be much blamed if he were to decide that Ethan Smith’s book with its suggestion as to the division of his Israelites into two peoples … and of the savages overcoming the civilized division led to the fashioning of chiefly those same things in the Book of Mormon?”24 Vogel is similarly interested in whether Joseph Smith was influenced by Ethan Smith, Solomon Spaulding, and a host of others who spun similar yarns in the years leading up to the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830. And although Vogel’s discussion adds significantly to our understanding of the contemporary possibilities, after taking pains not to be accused of reductionism, the discussion ends there.25
The Book of Mormon can be seen as a variation on a (revisionist Hebrew) theme. But this view fails to take into account how Smith’s writing sheds light on his cultural environs, too. One is reminded, for example, of a new trend in Jewish studies that proffers the New Testament as a primary source for the study of the Mishnah and Talmud since chronologically, at least, this makes a good deal of sense—more so than liberal Christians’ use of Jewish writings in the exegesis of the Christian scriptures. Moreover, as Alan Segal has shown,26 Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism can be seen as inextricably connected, responding to a similar set of social and cultural issues, arriving at profoundly different conclusions but not independent of one another. Similarly, a discussion of the Book of Mormon’s spin on the Hebraic origin of the American Indians can benefit from an approach that allows for both continuity and disparity. There are elements of both monogenesis and a soft polygenesis in the Book of Mormon, environmentalism and supernaturalism, the myth of the Hebraic origin of the American Indians and British Israelism, with generous sprinklings of both the curse of Canaan and mark of Cain.
The Book of Mormon’s peculiar spin on the Hebraic origin of the American Indians has a Masonic and/or British Israelite slant. This may explain why it takes pains to distinguish between its peoples and the ten lost tribes—who, it seems, are truly lost to all but the Father and Son. British Israelism traces its intellectual origins to the British nationalist Richard Brothers (1757–1824). Brothers theorized that the ten tribes of Israel migrated to England to escape Assyrian and Babylonian aggression, a school of thought with a significant following in both England and the United States as early as 1800.27 It has been accused of fostering what Hebrew scholar N. H. Parker called a “narrow nationalism and narrower Christianity” (p. ix). This would not be an unfair assessment of the Book of Mormon.
William Carpenter, writing in The Freemason, explains that Freemasons are direct descendants of Joseph through the loins of Ephraim, “messengers or missionaries of God’s grace and mercy to mankind, through whom Judah is to be regenerated and restored, and the fulness of the Gentiles to be brought in.”28 The foundations of Freemasonry are said to be “laid in JUDAISM—using this word in its widest sense, as equivalent to ISRAELITISM” (p. 1). British and American Freemasons, he writes, form “part of that race which is to be employed by the Almighty in turning men from darkness to light” (p. 193; emphasis mine). And yet British Israelism is also the inspiration behind the violent Christian Identity Movement and other rabid, anti-Semitic groups that claim the Jews, through intermarriage, gave up their claim to the Abrahamic covenant. Similarly, the Book of Mormon adopts Gentiles into the house of Israel and through them promises to turn darkness to light (Smith is identified as a direct descendant of Joseph through the loins of Ephraim and thus a conduit of Masonic light).29
Quaint though the Hebrew argument may be, such theorizing was nonetheless respected, the American Indians “widely regarded as having descended from the House of Israel, specifically through the Lost Ten Tribes.”30 Notably, the modern view—that the native inhabitants of the Americas crossed the Bering Strait over a land bridge—predominated in academic circles then as now.31 Still, the notion of the Hebraic origin of the American Indians had its charm, though it did not extend to America’s other Americans.32 Josiah Priest was another antebellum New Yorker to characterize Indians as Hebrews in deerskin robes. Africans were another matter, the “cursed” offspring of Ham and Canaan—red a by-product of climate and black the handiwork of the Deity.33 Of course, environmentalism hardly escaped the orbit of antebellum prejudice against natives. The noble savage was half savage, and if a child of God, then still a child, to be trained up in the way of civilization or else. As Horace Bushnell would later write in a work whose title comes rather too close to the truth as whites conceived it then (Nature and the Supernatural, as Together Constituting One System of God), “savages were beings, or races physiologically run down, or become effete, under sin.”34 Nature was seen by many as the agent of God’s wrath and thus climate more of a rubber stamp than a prime mover in the divine economy. Smith’s discussion of the “people of Cainan” in his Inspired Version falls into this category: a savagely hot climate causes their skin to turn black, which in turn forces them to keep to themselves, to descend further into savagery until they are the scourge of civilization.
What the Hebraic origin of the American Indians gave with one hand it took away with the other. As Robert F. Berkhofer explains, Indians were now simply “corrupt copies of the Jewish or other high civilizations of the past or, at worst, the very agents of Satan’s own degeneracy.”35 In some important respects, such theorizing implied that natives were damaged goods, and this was all the more reason to let nature run its course. The sooner the better, too, for whites might be enticed to go over to the dark side—literally—giving in to their latent animal instincts. Roy Harvey Pearce suggests that the average American white male at the time “hated himself for his yearning. He was tempted, we might say; and he felt driven to destroy the temptation and likewise the tempters. He pitied the tempters, because in his yearning for a simpler life, he could identify with them. He censured them, because he was ashamed to be tempted, and he refused to deny his higher nature.”36 Popular literature played along, disseminating two competing stereotypes: native as nobleman and as subhuman. This juxtaposition served several functions. Celebrating the noble savage long after the extermination of the Indians bordered on tokenism, whereas vilifying natives for savage reprisals justified harsh and grievous treatment at the hands of vengeful whites. Captivity narratives underscored this, with Indian bestiality and warmongering, torture as communal spectacle, and cannibalism common themes in such lurid depictions of native culture.
Mass exterminations, rape, human sacrifice, and cannibalism in the Book of Mormon of both Nephites and Lamanites may indeed serve the same function, pouring cold water on the white American male libido and the accompanying incorrigible lust for women of color.37 This did not reflect a perceived need to destroy temptation of some nondescript kind—a failure to be less than honest in one’s business dealings or a penchant for the occasional drink. The average white American male does not wish simply to be freed from romantic ideas of roughing it alone in the woods. Rather, in the eyes of civilized society, at least, the issue seemed to be the removal of temptation of the interracial connubial kind.
The story of the daughters of the Lamanites and the priests of wicked King Noah is a case in point:
Now there was a place in Shemlon, where the daughters of the Lamanites did gather themselves together to sing, and to dance, and to make themselves merry. And it came to pass that there was one day a small number of them gathered together to sing and to dance. And now the priests of Noah … having tarried in the wilderness, and having discovered the daughters of the Lamanites, they laid and watched them; and when there were but few of them gathered together to dance, they came forth out of their secret places, and took them and carried them into the wilderness.
(p. 196)
Their disappearance (rape) is avenged in a bloody war that ends badly for the Nephites.
The sexual assault on the daughters of the Lamanites by the priests of wicked King Noah appears in the so-called Record of Zeniff, which recounts the woes of a band of Nephites who attempt to live peaceably among the Lamanites in the land of Lehi-Nephi. Zeniff has a dream that one day Nephites and Lamanites will live together in harmony. As the story unfolds, however, the Book of Mormon seems to want to suggest that Zeniff pays dearly for his credulity. The Lamanites descend upon them in droves every time any cracks appear in the Zeniffite armor, the disappearance of twenty-four young Lamanite women only the latest justification for yet another all-out Lamanite offensive. Wicked King Noah is one of those Nephite monarchs whose abuse of power flings open the gates of the city to the Lamanite hordes. And so it goes until Ammon and his brethren, emissaries of the Nephite king Mosiah, lead them out of bondage under cover of night and back to the land of Zarahemla and to freedom. Their story and the abuses of power and concomitant enslavement will cause Mosiah to usher in a reign of judges.
However much this can be seen as a testament to the virtues of republican government, there is more than mere political propaganda at work here. The story of the daughters of the Lamanites and the priests of wicked King Noah leaves no doubt as to the racial nature of the original peace treaty between the people of Zeniff and the Lamanites: “And Limhi said unto him, What cause have ye to come up to war against my people? Behold my people have not broken the oath that I made unto you; wherefore why should ye break the oath which ye made to my people?” The oath the Lamanites make with the Nephites is simply to allow them to occupy the land and live their lives unmolested. In return, Nephite men promise not to molest Lamanite women: “And now the [Lamanite] king said, I have broken the oath, because thy people did carry away the daughters of my people; wherefore in my anger I did cause my people to come up to war against thy people” (p. 196). Limhi and his people pay dearly for the sexual indiscretions of their king and priestly class despite the fact that the white male rank and file had respected the ban. No matter. Indentured servitude is the logical consequence—and a curse to all when the racial mixing occurs.
Mosiah’s suspension of the Nephite monarchy, then, might be said to have a hidden, segregationist (racial) agenda. Wicked King Noah and his priests tax the people grievously to support an addiction to “wives and concubines” (p. 178). The Book of Mormon, however, is of two minds where such interracial polygamous unions are concerned: “Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord … for there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none…. For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up a seed unto me, I will command my people: otherwise, they shall hearken unto these things” (p. 126). Concubinage in the Book of Mormon has an important and, in some respects, obvious racial dimension that has been overlooked. The hedonism and promiscuity of wicked King Noah and his priests serve no greater end than the satisfaction of male lust, and herein lies the problem. That the Deity reserves the right to command his priests to take wives or concubines “to raise up seed unto [him]” from time to time suggests that polygamy can also be seen as the engine of racial renewal, more or less as B. Carmon Hardy has shown,38 but an exclusively white male–black/red female affair—a necessary and indeed temporary measure of an interracial but assimilationist kind. Accordingly, polygamy as exclusively white on white (from the standpoint of the Book of Mormon, that is) can be seen as redundant, playing no significant role in the redemption of the Lamanites (dark peoples) and thus exemplary of what the Book of Mormon simply calls “whoredom.” Indeed, when the god of the Book of Mormon says, “For I, the Lord God, delighteth in the chastity of women,”39 this may or may not apply to women of color. (A Mormon variant of the Templar belief that Christ married Mary Magdalene, allegedly a black prostitute who bore him children of “pure blood”?)
The Book of Mormon is very clear about the consequences when white husbands succumb to the temptation to cohabit with women of color for purely recreational sex. Blame for the downfall of the Nephites is laid squarely at the feet of “the men of my people.” A “sore curse, even unto destruction,” is the punishment for male lust: “I will not suffer, saith the Lord of Hosts; for they shall not lead away captive, the daughters of my people, because of their tenderness, save I shall visit them with a sore curse, even unto destruction: for they shall not commit whoredoms, like unto they of old, saith the Lord of Hosts” (p. 127). For white (Nephite) men to enjoin white (Nephite) women to have polygamous intercourse for whatever reason is strictly forbidden.
Despite “the darkness of their skin,” the Lamanites are praised on occasion for not having more than one wife and marrying within their race (the two going together in the divine mind):
Behold, the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate, because of their filthiness and the cursings which hath come upon their skins, are more righteous than you; for they have not forgotten the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our fathers, that they should have, save it were one wife [of their race?]; and concubines [of other races?] should they have none; and there were no whoredoms committed among them…. O my brethren, I fear, that unless ye shall repent of your sins, that their skins will be whiter than yours, when ye shall be brought with them before the throne of God.
(p. 128)
IN THIS CASE, “whiter” seems to have the sense of “purer” or “pure-blooded.” In short, endogamous polygamy and what the Nephite/Zennifite priests of wicked King Noah did is a distinction without a difference. Until the Deity says so, Nephite and Lamanite men and women are to be vigilant monogamists of the strict, endogamous kind.
A more gender-specific analysis dramatically changes our understanding of the reason for the curse, too. Significantly, the Deity scorches the land that turns recalcitrant Adamites dark. Once the land has done its dirty work, such benighted peoples are adopted into the apostate priesthood and lineage of Cain. They become a scourge to all that is good and true, a threat to both the ecclesiastic integrity and racial purity of the people of God. However, the temptress in their midst is the thin edge of the wedge, and so a dark skin is assumed to be a bit of rather good preventive medicine sent from on high. As the Book of Mormon sees it, although pure white is as beautiful as pure black, ultimately white is beautiful and black is repellent—especially, it rather naively assumes, to the white Nephite male watching Lamanite women dance their hearts away at a distance. That the average black (Lamanite) male in the Book of Mormon seems to find any white (Nephite) female passerby completely unnerving is simply a variation on the theme perhaps best captured by D. W. Griffith in his infamous blockbuster Birth of a Nation: the specter of the black man and his unsuspecting white female victim. When the Nephites are about to be destroyed, their white women are sent to the front lines to beguile the Lamanites (sell themselves into white slavery and concubinage if necessary):
Now it came to pass that the king commanded them that all the men should leave their wives and their children, and flee before Lamanites. Now there were many that would not leave them, but had rather stay and perish with them…. And it came to pass that those that tarried with their wives and their children, caused that their fair daughters should stand forth and plead with the Lamanites, that they should not slay them. And it came to pass that the Lamanites had compassion on them, for they were charmed with the beauty of their women; therefore the Lamanites did spare their lives, and took them captive, and carried them back to the land of Nephi, and granted unto them that they might possess the land.
(pp. 194–195)
Indeed, the implication is that Lamanite women are not attractive even to Lamanite men. Nephi’s discussion of the curse supports this. A dark skin seems primarily a pox visited on Lamanite women to keep Nephite men at bay.
But in the next breath the Book of Mormon seems to take it all back. A repentant albeit dark-skinned Lamanite few mix with the Nephites and become “white and delightsome.” The curse, in their case, is lifted. Modern editions of the Book of Mormon read “pure and delightsome” (2 Nephi 30:6), an attempt on the part of apologists to mitigate the overtly racist tone of much of the discussion. However, whether the metamorphosis from black to white also concerns white (Nephite) men and dark-skinned (Lamanite) women is the far more interesting question to ponder. The anti-Nephi Lehis—Lamanite converts to Nephite Christianity who become white—are another vantage point from which to test this. “The curse of God did no more follow them…. And it came to pass that those Lamanites which had united with the Nephites were numbered among the Nephites; and their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites” (p. 465). Elsewhere, following the visit of Jesus, the Book of Mormon states that “the people of Nephi did wax strong, and did multiply exceedingly fast, and became an exceedingly fair and delightsome people” (p. 515).
We might infer from “multiply exceedingly fast” that the transformation was facilitated by a a brief but intense period of exogamous polygamous marriages. None of this sounds particularly amorous, either. There seems no reason to believe that first-generation Lamanite women who marry Nephites could expect the color of their skin to change. Rather, the children of such marriages (polygamous or not) seem to be the targets of a degree of noticeable supernatural intervention. Inasmuch as the curse and redemption of the Lamanites are exclusively a white-male-and-black-female affair and quite possibly polygamous in nature, the curse might also be said to guard against it ever becoming amorous but rather interracial polygamous sex as cold and puritanical as its white Utah Mormon counterpart is rumored to have been.40 And so changes to some of the references from “white and delightsome” to “pure and delightsome” (at the behest of the book’s author in some cases, with good text-critical authority in others) may indeed represent a harder line where the first generation of Lamanite (women) is concerned. The children of white-red/black union might be described as the cutting edge of the early Mormon plan for racial equality. This is what the Book of Mormon means when it talks of there being no more Nephites and Lamanites. And when there are no more Nephites and Lamanites, there is no more polygamy. If there is, the Book of Mormon seems to suggest that it does not have the approval of heaven and thus constitutes “whoredom.”
The suggestion that the early Mormon mission to the Indians was quite daring might be said to but scratch the surface. “If to the modern mind this account of the racial origins of the Indians appears naive and simplistic,” Hansen writes, “it is quite in keeping with the intellectual assumptions of the period in which the Book of Mormon was published…. Although the Book of Mormon does not say so directly, later exegesis suggests that the curse upon the Lamanites may have been a natural result of their savage way of life. It was because they wore fewer clothes than their Nephite brethren and were more frequently exposed to the sun and weather that they turned into a ‘dark, and loathsome’ people.”41 The intellectual assumptions of the period to which Hansen refers can be traced in one form or another to the work of Samuel Stanhope Smith (yet another Smith), who proffered a climate-based theory of the origins of the different races that took issue with the emerging polygenesis, or American school, and a lot of sophisticated talk about a series of supernatural creations and divinely controlled climatic zones—one for each of the five racial stocks. His book An Essay on the Causes of the Varieties of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species is a tempting final and singular source for the Book of Mormon discussion of Indian origins, to be sure.
The parallels are striking. Although (Samuel Stanhope) Smith believed that black skin was a “defect,” he believed just as strongly in a “cure.” And a simple one it was, in principle. In practice, however, it proved no match for that social and cultural air-borne virus endemic to Americans since Bacon’s rebellion—racism—for he rather bravely (for his time) thought white-black union the quickest and easiest way for the country to heal itself in the midst of escalating North-South tensions over slavery. What is more, his climatic theories had particular application to native Africans, so that what he actually proposed was not some mealy-mouthed white-on-red scenario but white on black.42 White on red, in principle at least, was redundant. If America was “naturally suited to the white race,” then Native Americans, he surmised, were Caucasians. As Winthrop D. Jordan explains, the color red (in the white mind) was a product of too much “bear grease and war paint.”43
Climate plays a role in the transformation of Nephites into Lamanites and back again. Miscegenation is also how the good work of racial reclamation will be done on the ground. However, inasmuch as the Book of Mormon can be seen as a discussion of Indian, not African-American, origins, its use of the curse of Canaan myth suggests that the reclamation of native peoples could not simply be left to nature or even to nurture but to divinely inspired, sanctioned, and carefully controlled white-red polygamous union. The early Mormon mission to the Lamanites may well have had no intentions of making Indian men either the beneficiaries or the victims of its racial elevating. Its attacks seem directed, in fact, at males of color—Indian and African. To what degree its appeal to women cut across racial lines completely (again in principle) finds support both in the text and elsewhere—the redemption of the Lamanites per se being a marriage proposal to as many women of either Native American or African ancestry who would walk through the temple on the arms of less-than-adoring, duty-bound white grooms.
Smith’s instruction to Mormon missionaries to marry Indian women, promising that their offspring would be “white, delightsome and just,” like unto the Nephites, supports this.44 Whether it included African-American women in any sense seems doubtful. According to my reading of the Book of Mormon, however, it perhaps should have. “Had I any thing to do with the Negro,” Smith wrote in 1842 in his journal, “I would confine them by strict laws to their own Species.”45 Another journal entry, dated February 8, 1844, contains the details of a court trial in which he fined “2 negroes” for “trying to marry white women” (p. 445). Mormonism might indeed be said to stand on the Masonic social vanguard, opening its lodge or temple to white women (by marriage), to be sure, but to native women and perhaps even to African women as well, discriminating against men of African ancestry rather than men and women of color per se. One thing seems certain. We should not presume that Smith’s instruction to Mormon missionaries to take “Lamanite wives” was an invitation for aboriginal men to come and do likewise in the white community. Moreover, though the two unfortunate black suitors sent packing were certainly victims of racism, their gender may have been a factor, too. In both cases, the Mormon prophet proceeded on good authority from the Book of Mormon, extending the (white, male) hand of full fellowship to women of native ancestry.
THERE ARE WICKED WOMEN in the Book of Mormon, as I have noted. Men of color are particularly at issue, however, a priestly class of apostate males who drag loving wives and adoring children down with them. The book’s critique of “apostate Masonry” is aimed at men (of color), not women, for the most part. This may be one of the reasons the book contains precious little that speaks exclusively to women. Mormon feminists have mistaken this for a kind of patriarchal myopia that ignores women as a matter of course. The paucity of female input, however, can also be seen as good news indeed for women of color generally. Women are left out of the discussion because it does not concern them. They are only guilty of being dutiful wives and daughters of the apostate priesthood, of “mixing their seed with the Lamanites,” and for this reason perhaps the curse of Canaan will not be a permanent mark on their record. The redemption of the Lamanites in the Book of Mormon, then—the metamorphosis from black to white—can be seen as an olive branch to obeisant women of color.
The curse of the Lamanites can be seen as no less gender specific—a discussion of male depravation, in other words (p. 584). Not unlike Nephi’s use of “fair and delightsome,” word choice is telling. Passages that describe the Lamanites as a “stiffnecked people … whose hearts delighteth in the shedding of blood; whose days have been spent in the grossest iniquity; whose ways have been the ways of a transgressor from the beginning,”46 do not apply to women. Enos, another prophet in the Book of Mormon, explains that:
the people of Nephi did seek diligently to restore the Lamanites unto the true faith in God. But our labors were vain; their hatred was fixed, and they were led by an evil nature, that they became wild, and ferocious, and a bloodthirsty people; full of idolatry, and filthiness; feading [sic] upon beasts of prey, dwelling in tents, and wandering about the wilderness, with a short skin girded about their loins, and their heads shaven; and their skill was in the bow, and the cimeter, and the axe.—And many of them did eat nothing save it was raw meat; and they were continually seeking to destroy us.
(pp. 144–145)
Assuming, of course, that Lamanite women did not burn their bras and shave their heads, these and other passages can be seen as a criticism of the degradation of the Lamanite male and perhaps of the hopelessness of that mission and that mission only. Samuel the Lamanite is the exception—a native convert to Christianity sent to preach repentance to his otherwise righteous Nephite cousins—the quintessence of nobility and savagery, a veritable red John the Baptist and thus a reconstituted white Lamanite (pp. 441<th>ff). A congregant of godly Lamanites who “grow exceedingly in the knowledge of their God … because of their easiness and willingness to believe in his word” (p. 425), his oratory a Jeffersonian tribute to native eloquence, such a character is simply too good to be true.47 In fact, the reason for the occasional and brief suspension of male endogamous monogamy seems entirely in the hope of more like Samuel coming into the world.
To be fair, the Book of Mormon errs on the side of a cautious pessimism where the salvation of the red man is concerned. In most cases, black on red—for the average Lamanite male, that is—does not wash off. The book attacks an exclusively male priesthood that is said to reach as far back as Cain, the first murderer in the Bible. The construction of the ill-fated Tower of Babel is but one of the many attempts to take heaven by force by his male descendants, a band of male malcontents who wreak havoc wherever they go.48 The Gadianton robbers, the worst of the Lamanites,49 murder for gain as Cain did.50 Seantum is accused of murdering his brother, Seezoram. Not unlike Cain of old, he denies any knowledge of his sibling’s whereabouts: “And ye shall say unto him, Have ye murdered your brother? … And behold, he shall deny unto you; and he shall make as if he were astonished; nevertheless, he shall declare unto you that he is innocent” (p. 433). When Seantum is confronted, his feigned astonishment revives Cain’s infamous rejoinder, “I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9). The allusion to the mark of Cain and curse of Canaan in the Book of Mormon, then, is a condemnation of men who forsake the true priesthood and murder for gain, making them sons of perdition like Cain and thus a lost cause. In the end, the Nephites are exterminated by the Lamanites at a place the Book of Mormon calls “Camorah,” also the name of a Spanishborn secret dagger society organized in Italy in 1820 (the Camorra) and a word that means “to quarrel.”51
This brings us back to the question of the priesthood ban against blacks and whether the Book of Mormon may indeed be seen as soft on women of color but taking the hard line where men of color (of mixed blood, in particular) are concerned. In some respects, ordination only confuses the issue, since ordination and priesthood are not necessarily the same thing. The offices of the priesthood are not the priesthood; rather, the temple is the priesthood. Allowing women to go through the temple as equal participants with men can be seen as an ordination. In modern Mormon parlance, one talks of going through the temple in order to receive the saving ordinances—the new and everlasting covenant of marriage chief among them. The endowment, another word for the temple ritual, implies priesthood power, a fact that seems lost on most modern Mormons, who presume that priesthood comprises exclusively the administrative degrees of deacon, teacher, priest, elder, seventy, and high priest. The debate over whether the priesthood ban was a practice or a doctrine, whether Smith—who ordained a few black men—would have approved or disapproved, may indeed be somewhat beside the point. If the temple is the priesthood, then those who contend for a gentler, kinder Smith on the issue of blacks and priesthood do not have even a single leg to balance on.
The Mormon prophet was in no sense immune to the racism of his day, “an unfortunate and embarrassing survival of a once expedient institution,” according to many, and a corollary of social forces contemporaneous with the Mormon flight from Missouri.52 Still, a sizable body of evidence suggests that he would never have approved of the overtly racist policies of Brigham Young—the priesthood ban against blacks, in particular.53 Mormonism under Young was Anglo-Saxon—Germanic, Scandinavian, and British, for the most part.54 Increasingly, conversion to Mormonism came to be seen as a process of racial bonding and naturalization that did not include people of color.55 To be fair, as Bringhurst explains, Mormons “shared those racist ideas prevalent in American society” and thus “incorporated these attitudes and practices into the superstructure of their theology and doctrine as it was being developed by Joseph Smith and other church leaders during Mormonism’s formative years.”56
A foremost authority (his scholarship playing a decisive role in the change of policy), Lester E. Bush suggests that “Joseph Smith … provided a context which, in his absence, inevitably led to a policy of priesthood denial to blacks.”57 Ronald K. Esplin agrees. In his view, Young proceeded on the basis of an understood fact, “doing nothing he did not see Smith do.”58 Smith’s advisers were anti-African and proslavery almost to the man: Charles B. Thompson, Lyman Wight (who led a company of Saints to Texas), and Sidney Rigdon, as well as Brigham Young.59
Of great help to the cause to end discrimination based on race was the important fact that Smith had ordained several black men. The ordination of Elijah Abel and a couple of other African-American men, as Jessie L. Embry writes in her book Black Saints in a White Church, is surely “an obstacle to those who try to trace priesthood denial to Joseph Smith.”60 However, Abel was a mulatto with very fair skin, by all accounts, and his ordination was revoked the moment his African ancestry became known—that single and deciding drop of Cainite blood tipping the balance the other way.61 At the same time, he continued to be an active member of the Third Quorum of Seventies until his death in 1884, being called to serve a mission for the church.62 The only fact of any real importance or relevance is that he was not permitted to go through the temple and be sealed to his wife. Samuel Chambers was another black man whose ordination did not qualify him to go through the temple and be sealed to his wife and children.
The case of Jane Manning James, the black domestic servant of Joseph and Emma Smith, is no less telling. Her request to be sealed to Walker Lewis (another black ordained by Smith, though not her husband) was denied. Jane then claimed that Emma had offered to have her sealed to Joseph as a child. This was also denied. The best she could do was to be adopted into the Smith family as their servant in a special ceremony (pp. 40–41). Ironically, under polygamy, her chances of being sealed were probably as good as they were going to get for a long, long time. Both Smith and Young seemed unaware of how dangerously close to mere “whoredom” Mormon polygamy came by not being more open to women of color.
FIGURE 42 Brother Joseph Brant, the Mohawk Chief
Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 1:150a.
Mormonism could and would discriminate against men of color in good faith as the cursed offspring of Cain and the apostate priesthood—sons of perdition. That Smith ordained black men to the offices of the priesthood but drew the line at the temple suggests that he and Young were in agreement. Men of African (Cainite/Cainanite/Canaanite) descent were apostate Masons and thus to be barred from the priesthood. For Smith, however, the priesthood was the temple. Under Young, it was extended to include the offices of deacon, teacher, priest, elder, seventy, and high priest. Young’s was not a harder line but rather a broader one that can be seen to contravene the adoptive spirit of the Book of Mormon, denying women of color even the most nominal claim to what was rightfully theirs if they wanted it: a place in the kingdom of God as a plural wife, the polygamous woman of color being a necessary evil in the resurrection of a chosen seed and thus the redemption of the Lamanites.
The priesthood ban was lifted almost a hundred years after the Mormon church published its first official statements announcing the last divinely sanctioned polygamous marriages. The efforts of women missionaries such as Embry (who worked for the church in the Halifax, Canada, Mission in the midseventies) played an important role in the dramatic change in policy and ordination of black men to the priesthood and the admittance of black men and women to the temple. The case of Mary Frances Sturlaugson, a black woman convert from Tennessee, is also instructive. For her, the issue of priesthood denial revolved around white women who were being called to do missionary work without being ordained. It did not occur to her that this might permit the black men of the church (the few there were) to fulfill a term of service—in effect, as stretcher bearers for the cause. Rather, her first thought was that the black women of the church ought to be the first to go.63 The revelation lifting the ban came so quickly on the heels of this realization that it is possible that the growing number of female missionaries may have played the most decisive role in ending racial discrimination against men and women of color in this all-white, male-dominated church.
Based on my reading of the Book of Mormon and the notion that divinely sanctioned polygamy of the interracial regenerative kind was to be a kind of backdoor to the temple for women of color and their children only as part of a scheme of race regeneration, a lifting of the priesthood ban against males of African descent was perhaps inevitable, the only means left to the church in the wake of monogamous, Evangelical conformity to keep its promises to “the daughters of the Lamanites.” (The church’s role in placing Indian children in Mormon homes as foster children had proven less than satisfactory to everyone concerned by that time. Any thoughts of integration of even the paternalistic kind seemed to evaporate in the stifling Utah heat.) Whether Kimball consulted his Book of Mormon or not, his decision to open the doors of the temple to the sons and daughters of Cain in the broad sense marks the end of the redemption of the Lamanites as originally conceived by Smith as a radical, albeit flawed, plan for racial renewal through interracial marriage on a grand scale.
Modern Mormonism and its monogamous family lifestyle are no longer a purely white-on-white affair, to be sure, but neither are they a white-and-black/black-and-white affair, either. According to the Book of Mormon, a multiplicity of Indian and African women were to pass through the temple, joined in holy matrimony to a monogamous white male with a white spouse without this being a contradiction. In the pecking order, polygamous women of color would find themselves at the beck and call of the singular white mistress of the house. (One assumes that poor Fanny Stenhouse would have blown a gasket.) In a sense, early Mormonism veered off the path of the Book of Mormon when the elders of the church (Smith included) took no Lamanite wives and twenty-and-four daughters of the Nephites to the temple and then to their beds, committing the very sin, according to the book, that produced Nephites and Lamanites—white and black—and thus laying waste to the early utopian dream of salvation bi-race alone.