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In the 1820s a little free Black girl was taken into the Connecticut household of Joseph and Dorinda Fitch, [1] to be a companion to their daughter, Caroline. This little Black girl was Jane Manning, whose father had died.
In early 1841, when Caroline was fourteen, [2] Jane joined the Presbyterian Church:
“…yet I did not feel satisfied. It seemed to me there was something more that I was looking for. I had belonged to the [Presbyterian] Church about eighteen months when an Elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints, [who] was traveling through our country, preached there. The pastor of the Presbyterian Church forbade me going to hear them as he had heard I had expressed a desire to hear them; nevertheless I went on a Sunday and was fully convinced that it was the true gospel he presented and I must embrace it.
“The following Sunday I was baptized and confirmed a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” [3]
After Jane’s baptism, she shared the gospel with her family. Many were baptized, including Jane’s mother, Eliza, and siblings Isaac Lewis, Peter, Sarah [Stebbins] and Angeline. The spouses of her brother Peter and her sister Sarah were also baptized. In the fall of 1843 the LDS converts in the extended Manning family decided to travel to Nauvoo.
“We started from Wilton, Connecticut, and traveled by canal to Buffalo, New York. We were to go to Columbus, Ohio before our fares were to be collected, but they insisted on having the money at Buffalo and would not take us farther. So we left the boat and started on foot to travel a distance of over eight hundred miles.
“We walked until our shoes were worn out, and our feet became sore and cracked open and bled until you could see the whole print of our feet with blood on the ground. We stopped and united in prayer to the Lord; we asked God the Eternal Father to heal our feet. Our prayers were answered and our feet were healed forthwith.
“When we arrived at Peoria, Illinois, the authorities threatened to put us in jail to get our free papers. We didn’t know at first what he meant, for we had never been slaves, but he concluded to let us go. So we traveled on until we came to a river, and as there was no bridge, we walked right into the stream. When we got to the middle, the water was up to our necks but we got safely across. Then it became so dark we could hardly see our hands before us, but we could see a light in the distance, so we went toward it. We found it was an old Log Cabin. Here we spent the night. The next day we walked for a considerable distance, and stayed that night in a forest out in the open air.
“The frost fell on us so heavy, it was like a light fall of snow. We arose early and started on our way walking through that frost with our bare feet, until the sun rose and melted it away. But we went on our way rejoicing, singing hymns, and thanking God for his infinite goodness and mercy to us–in blessing us as he had, protecting us from all harm, answering our prayers, and healing our feet.
“In course of time, we arrived at La Harpe, Illinois–-about thirty miles from Nauvoo. At La Harpe, we came to a place where there was a very sick child. We administered to it, and the child was healed. I found after [that] the elders had before this given it up, as they did not think it could live.
“We had now arrived to our destined haven of rest: the beautiful Nauvoo! Here we went through all kinds of hardship, trial and rebuff, but we at last got to Brother Orson Spencer’s. He directed us to the Prophet Joseph Smith’s mansion. When we found it, Sister Emma was standing in the door, and she kindly said, ‘Come in, come in!’ ” [4]
Jane Welcomed into the Smith Household
Joseph and Emma welcomed the Manning party into the Mansion House in November 1843. [5] The first order of business was to find room for the weary travelers. Jane says Joseph asked some “white sisters that was present” to share their room with the six Black women and three Black men in the party. [6] These sisters were likely Sarah and Maria Lawrence.
Next, Joseph sat the party down, introduced them to Emma and Dr. Bernhisel, then asked them to tell of their travels. When Jane was done telling their story, Brother Joseph slapped Dr. Bernhisel on the knee and said, “What do you think of that, Dr.? Isn’t that faith?”
The Dr. said, “Well I rather think it is. If it had have been me, I fear I should have backed out and returned to my home!”
Jane and her family stayed in the Mansion House for a week, by which time all but Jane had secured work and homes. The folks of Nauvoo may have hesitated to take Jane in because she was an unwed mother. [7] Jane’s plight was also dire as her luggage had been lost during the trip. She wrote:
“On the morning that my folks all left to go to work, I looked at myself–clothed in the only two pieces I possessed–[and] I sat down and wept.
“Brother Joseph came into the room as usual, and said, ‘Good morning. Why–not crying, [are you]?’
“ ‘Yes sir. The folks have all gone and got themselves homes and I have got none.’
“He said, ‘Yes you have. You have a home right here, if you want it. You mustn’t cry; we dry up all tears here.’
“I said, ‘I have lost my trunk and all my clothes.’
“He asked how I had lost them. I told him I put them in care of Charles Wesley Wandell [8] and paid him for them and he has lost them.
“Brother Joseph said, ‘Don’t cry. You shall have your trunk and clothes again.’ Brother Joseph went out and brought Sister Emma in and said, ‘Sister Emma, here is a girl that says she has no home. Haven’t you a home for her?’
“ ‘Why yes, if she wants one.’
“He said, ‘She does.’ And then he left us.
“Sister Emma said, ‘What can you do?’
“I said, ‘I can wash, iron, cook, and do housework.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘when you are rested, you may do the washing, [9] if you would just as soon do that.’
“I said, ‘I am not tired.’
“ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you may commence your work in the morning.’ ” [10]
Jane’s duties eventually expanded to include cooking. Sarah Holmes was about five years old and a constant companion of the Smith children when Jane joined the Smith household. Sarah’s record recalled the happy evenings when Emma would be about in the city with Eliza Snow on Relief Society business. Elvira Cowles [Holmes] would be at the Mansion House with the children, telling them stories. And the children would sneak cookies from the Black cook.
In 1897 at the Jubilee celebration of Brigham Young’s arrival in Utah, Sarah Holmes [Weaver] reunited with Jane. Sarah’s account describes Jane looking at her, now a great-grandmother, and saying, “Are you the little girl who used to steal my cookies!” [11]
Jane and the Covenant
At some point the Lawrence sisters took Jane with them on a visit to the Partridge sisters, who had moved out of the Mansion House a few weeks before Jane’s arrival. Jane recounts:
“Brother Joseph’s four wives, Emily Partridge, Eliza Partridge, Maria and Sarah Lawrence, and myself, were sitting discussing Mormonism and Sarah said, ‘What would you think if a man had more wives than one?’
“I said, ‘That is all right!’
“Maria said, ‘Well, we are all four Brother Joseph’s wives,:’
“I jumped up and clapped my hands and said, ‘That’s good.’
“Sarah said, ‘She is all right; she believes it all now.’ ” [12]
Jane also recounted finding Joseph’s ceremonial robes once when taking clothes to the basement to wash. “I looked at them and wondered–[as] I had never seen any before–and I pondered over them and thought about them so earnestly that the spirit made manifest to me that they pertained to the new name that is given the saints that the world knows not of.”
By the time Jane joined the Smith Household, the written revelation had indicated that Emma was to be the one who determined which women were to covenant with Joseph. We do not have any records from the women who covenanted with Joseph after July 1843 indicating that Emma approached the woman. The case of Fanny Young indicates Joseph did not always wait for Emma. However in other cases there is silence, rather than an active denial of Emma’s possible role, assigned by revelation.
In the account of Jane, we see a shadow of what Emma’s actions might have been for Joseph’s wives such as Malissa Lott. However Emma, for some reason, did not ask Jane to be one of Joseph’s wives. Jane explained:
“Sister Emma asked me one day if I would like to be adopted to them as their child. I did not answer her. She said, ‘I will wait awhile and let you consider it.’ She waited two weeks before she asked me again. When she did, I told her, ‘No Ma’am,’ because I did not understand or know what it meant. They were always good and kind to me but I did not know my own mind; I did not comprehend.” [13]
Jane may have been willing to covenant to be Joseph’s Celestial bride, based on her reported discussion with the Partridge and Lawrence sisters. But Jane had her own parents: Eliza and the departed Isaac. She could only have been adopted to Joseph and Emma by displacing her own parents.
Emma’s offer to adopt Jane appears to be the first time a sealing between a parent figure and a child was offered. This was an ordinance that Joseph had felt was too sacred to perform outside a temple.
For Emma, sealing Jane to Joseph and herself as a daughter may have been less daunting than offering Jane to Joseph as a wife. If Joseph risked death by covenanting with White women, what danger would Emma have anticipated if he were known to have covenanted with a Black woman?
Another factor in Emma’s thinking may have been the fact that Jane’s eight-year-old son, Sylvester, had been conceived as a result of rape. [14] Emma and Joseph likely did not believe in contagion and thus would not have been concerned about venereal disease or infection. Yet there still might have been a question regarding whether Jane should be considered pure.
On the other hand, others with whom Joseph entered into covenant may have previously been raped, as reported in the case of Eliza Snow. Therefore, it is not likely that Emma offered adoption rather than marriage primarily due to the attack Jane had suffered.
Lost Opportunity
With enough time, the matter might have been reopened. Jane might have had a chance to reconsider the offer of being sealed to Joseph, whether as daughter or as wife.
But there was no more time.
Soon after Emma’s offer that Jane be sealed to Joseph, the Nauvoo Expositor appeared, was destroyed, and martial law was put in place. Jane reports that the Mansion House was “broken up,” with the previous inhabitants sent to other homes for protection.
Jane left the Smith household and moved in with her mother. As the threat of occupation by hostile forces increased, Jane suggested that she and her single sister, Angeline, leave town. Mobs had inflicted terrible violence on White Mormon women in the past. Jane and Angeline may well have feared the violence they might be subjected to would be worse. They took refuge in Burlington, [15] nearly 30 miles northeast of Nauvoo in Iowa Territory, a free territory due to the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Born free, the sisters had no papers that would prove they were not escaped slaves.
Jane was gone from Nauvoo for three weeks. When she returned, Joseph was dead. She wrote:
“When he was killed, I liked to a died myself.” [16]
After Joseph’s death, Jane joined the household of Brigham Young. It was here that Jane met and married Isaac James, a Black man who had joined the Church in 1839.
As the years progressed, we see Jane socializing with the circle of women who had been Joseph’s wives. In particular, we have a story recounting a time Jane brought Eliza Partridge [Smith Lyman] two pounds of desperately needed flour when Eliza’s husband, Amasa Lyman, was gone on a mission.
The Priesthood Ban and Jane’s Request
Unrelated to Jane, a scandal arose involving one William McCary. William was a mulatto who claimed Indian heritage. After his baptism, he was welcomed into the community of saints in Winters Quarters. McCary was initially seen as a good brother, with fine musical talent and charisma. He wed Lucy Stanton, daughter of a former High Councilor and President of the Quincy, Illinois Stake.
In time it was discovered that William was engaging in a number of unorthodox activities. William claimed he had the power of prophesy and transfiguration, in particular claiming he had the power to appear as various biblical and Book of Mormon figures. He had also been “sealing” himself to women, an unauthorized ceremony unlike any plural marriage sanctioned by the Church. According to Nelson Whipple, president of the branch in Springville, Iowa, McCary would “seal” a woman by engaging in sexual intercourse with her three times in one day while his wife, Lucy, watched. [17]
On April 25, 1847, Parley P. Pratt chastised the Saints in Winter Quarters for following “a new thing” led by a “black man who has got the blood of Ham in him which linege [sic] was cursed as regards the priesthood.” Those studying the history of the long-term policy in the LDS Church denying Black men access to priesthood between 1852 and 1978 note this sermon as the first recorded connection between race and priesthood by one of the top leaders of the Church.
This experience involving marriage between a Black individual and White individual(s) did not go well. Lacking the reality of a familial bond between Joseph Smith and Jane Manning, the idea emerged that the blood of Ham, believed to be the father of Africans, [18] was a cursed lineage. Aside from the behavior of William McCary, many Christians believed “mixing the races” was a terrible idea. This revulsion was expressed by local Mormon leader, William Appleby, when he found that Black convert, Enoch Lewis, had married White convert, Mary Matilda Webster. [19]
As various converts from the South began to arrive in Utah, Brigham Young had to determine how to deal with their ownership of Black individuals. Whenever slaves were donated to the Church, Brigham would free them. However Brigham did not force slave owners to emancipate their slaves. [20] The Compromise of 1850 brought California into the Union as a free state and declared that the issue of slavery would be decided by “popular sovereignty” in the Utah and New Mexico territories created on the lands Brigham had designated Deseret. [21]
In January of 1852, the Utah Territorial Legislature deliberated over the matter of legalizing the claims of slave owners living in Utah. During the deliberations, Orson Pratt vehemently decried the practice of slavery, stating God did not authorize the buying and selling of the African race. He predicted legalizing slavery in Utah would bring condemnation from the United States and abroad and would hamper missionary work, stating “for us to bind the African because he is different from us in color is enough to cause the angels in heaven to blush.” [22]
Despite opposition to slavery, the Utah Legislature legalized slavery by passing the Act in Relation to Service on February 4, 1852. Brigham Young addressed the Legislature the following day. The original Pittman shorthand notes give the February date, showing Brigham was reacting to the legalization of slavery rather than giving an address in January providing direction, as has long been believed. During Brigham’s remarks, he gave his opinion that if Blacks were to be granted the priesthood, the priesthood would be taken from the Church. [23]
A few months after legalization of slavery in Utah Territory and Brigham’s remarks, the doctrines of plural marriage and proxy sealings were made public.
Enoch Lewis’s father, Walker Lewis, knew that the window for Blacks to enter into Celestial covenants was closing quickly. Walker Lewis was one of only two Black men who had been ordained to the priesthood who were still deemed righteous. In an attempt to establish the fact of Celestial sealing ordinances involving a Black man and a Black woman, Walker approached Jane in 1852 and asked if she would be sealed to him as an eternal wife. Jane’s husband had never been ordained to the priesthood, which was considered a necessary prerequisite to Celestial or temple marriage. Jane refused Enoch’s offer, likely because she wished to remain the mortal wife of Isaac James. With plural marriage a publicly acknowledged practice, a Jane sealed to Enoch Lewis would have been expected to become the mortal wife of the righteous man to whom she was sealed.
Yet Jane did decide she wished to be sealed to Joseph and Emma Smith as a daughter. We do not know what Jane might have said on the matter to Brigham Young, in whose household she had lived after Joseph’s death. Perhaps Brigham suggested that Emma was still alive, making it improper to perform the requested sealing without Emma’s participation.
After Emma’s death, Jane wrote to the new President of the Church, John Taylor, requesting the sealing be performed. By this time the policy denying Blacks access to the temple and its blessings was firmly in place. Undaunted, Jane continued her requests. Finally Joseph F. Smith proposed an alternative.
Emma was pariah, having refused to gather to Utah, and similarly having failed to teach her sons about their father’s legacy with respect to Celestial marriage and its allowance for plural marriage. Further, Joseph F. Smith had a long-held animosity towards Emma for her cavalier treatment of his father’s remains. He recalled the trauma as a young child going to visit his father’s secret burial place, only to find a rough hole, with the exposed skull of his uncle. [24] Joseph F. Smith’s mother, who had found the four men reburying Joseph and Hyrum per Emma’s instructions, had similarly felt Emma’s actions were high handed and uncalled for. [25]
It is doubtful Joseph F. Smith would have wanted to seal anyone to Emma. It is unlikely he would allow the faithful Jane Manning to be eternally adopted to a woman he despised, even had the priesthood ban not been in place. Further, sealings of “adoption” had fallen out of favor. In the General Conference of April 1894, President Wilford Woodruff announced the end of adoption sealings where the persons were not legally related to one another.
However Joseph F. Smith did remember Jane as a servant in the Smith home, the happy days when Jane would bake cookies and wash the laundry for the Smiths. He may have been one of the children partaking of the fresh-baked cookies Sarah Holmes would steal from Jane’s kitchen.
And so Joseph F. Smith proposed that he could arrange for Jane to be sealed to Joseph and Emma as their servant. This would allow Jane to have unquestioned access to the people she had loved in life. The ceremony was performed in May 1894, weeks after President Wilford Woodruff ended “adoption” sealings. As Jane herself was not permitted to enter the temple, proxies stood in for Jane, Joseph, and Emma during the ceremony.
To modern sensibilities, excluding Jane from the sealing ordinance and sealing Jane as an eternal servant is so incredibly offensive we cannot imagine what Joseph F. Smith could have been thinking.
But Joseph F. Smith did not live in our day. His respect for Jane Manning [James] was evident in his funeral address for Jane while he was the President of the Church, a respect and regard echoed in Jane’s Deseret News obituary:
“few persons were more noted for faith and faithfulness [than] was Jane Manning James, and so of the humble of the earth she numbered friends and acquaintances by the hundreds. Many persons will regret to learn that the kind and generous soul has passed from the earth.” [26]
Had Jane been Wife
What if Emma had asked Jane to covenant with Joseph as a spouse, rather than as a daughter? Jane already knew plural marriage was a possibility, based on the conversation with the Partridge and Lawrence sisters about their status as Joseph’s wives. There is no reason to think she would have hesitated if asked to covenant to be Joseph’s wife in eternity.
With Jane a member of the quorum of Joseph’s ceremonial wives, she would have almost certainly been sealed to Joseph in the temple. An important Church leader would have stood proxy, and Brigham Young would have been involved in some manner.
When William McCary engaged in inappropriate sexual relations with White women, there would have already been the example of Joseph having married a Black woman, a woman who might well have ended up married to Brigham Young. William McCary’s actions would still have been considered worthy of excommunication, but it would not have come down to a matter of mixing races as the objection.
Later, a Brigham Young who knew Jane had been married to Joseph Smith would have been hard-pressed to put in place the policies he did regarding Blacks. Brigham would still have needed to put certain policies in place in response to the Compromise of 1850, which failed to outlaw slavery in Utah territory. But the fact of a covenant between Joseph Smith and Jane would have set an example that would have prohibited those policies from being mistaken for doctrine.
In science, the butterfly effect is “the sensitive dependency on initial conditions in which a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.”
In the convoluted history of Blacks and the Mormon Church, the interaction between Emma and Jane is one such butterfly. By a small change, either Jane accepting the offer of being made a daughter, or Emma offering Jane the privilege of becoming Joseph’s covenant wife, a pattern of undeniable inclusion of a Black individual in the highest LDS ordinances would have been set during Joseph’s life.
To this alternate possible history where Jane had entered into covenant with Joseph, I could wish for an alternate history where the illicit intercourse scandal of 1841-1842 never occurred. Had it not been for Bennett’s perfidy, it is not certain Joseph would have felt it necessary to covenant with anyone after his April 1841 covenant with Louisa Beaman. Without the scandal, Joseph Smith might have enjoyed a natural life span. Joseph would have had decades to expound on the implications of the New and Everlasting Covenant and explain his covenants with Fanny Alger and Louisa Beaman.
Perhaps easier to imagine is a John C. Bennett who, though fallen and evicted, returned to openly deny all his false charges. This penitent Bennett could have had a place with the Saints in the west, able to powerfully deny all the lies he had previously spread.
If Joseph had lived longer, Bennett might have been able to return. As with Jane, the record contains tantalizing hints of an inclusive, redemptive past Mormonism might have had.
Daughter of Promise – Notes
Jane Manning was a free Black woman who lived in the Smith household during the winter of 1843/1844. Emma asked Jane to be sealed to Joseph and herself as an adopted daughter. Not understanding what this might mean, Jane refused.
Later Jane did desire to be sealed to Joseph and Emma. But events had occurred that led to a ban on allowing Blacks the blessing of temple sealing. Jane was eventually allowed to be sealed to the Smiths as a servant.
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[1] Jane’s diary mentions Joseph Fitch, his wife and daughter. Additional details on the Fitch family in Wilton were located in the book Descendants of Reinold and Matthew Marvin of Hartford, Ct., by George Franklin Marvin and William Theophilus Rogers Marvin, online 1 Jun 2014 at http://books.google.com/books?id=Gc81AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA430#v=onepage &q&f=false and familysearch.org.
[2] In Jane’s autobiography, she says she, herself, was fourteen. However Jane had a nine-year-old son in 1843. It is likely Jane was using the age of the girl for whom she served as companion. Manning James, Jane, Autobiography, online 1 Jun 2014 at http://www.blacklds.org/manning.
[3] Jane’s baptism was likely in the fall of 1842. It is therefore possible that the presence of the Elder in Wilton was occasioned by the missionary efforts conducted to dispel the lurid stories John C. Bennett was telling during his anti-Mormon campaign associated with publication of his History of the Saints.
[4] Manning James, Jane, Autobiography, online 1 Jun 2014 at http://www.blacklds.org/manning.
[5] Date is given in Black and Mormon, edited by Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith, online 2 Jun 2014 at http://books.google.com/books?id=5OBGf1djxKYC&pg=PA51#v= onepage&q&f=false.
[6] Jane’s mother had remarried a man named Cato Treadwill, who may have been part of the party, but is not mentioned in Jane’s account. This would have increased the number of men in the party to four.
[7] Jane’s son, Sylvester (KNVC-9HP), was eight years old when the Manning party arrived in Nauvoo.
[8] Elder Wandell was apparently the Elder who had baptized Jane, see Henry J. Wolfinger, “A Test of Faith: Jane Elizabeth James and the Origins of the Utah Black Community,” Social Accommodations in Utah (American West Center occasional papers, University of Utah, 1975), pp. 126–29. This is cited in Linda King Newell and Valery Tippetts Avery, “Jane Manning James: Black Saint, 1847 Pioneer,” Ensign, online 2 Jun 2014 at https://www.lds.org/ensign/1979/08/jane-manning-james-black-saint-1847-pioneer?lang= eng.
[9] It is worth noting that “the washing” had previously been the job of Emily Partridge, who had departed the Smith household a few weeks before Jane joined the Smith household.
[10] Manning James, Jane, Autobiography, online 1 Jun 2014 at http://www.blacklds.org/ manning.
[11] Life History of Sarah Elizabeth Holmes [Weaver], available at the Nauvoo Land and Records Office.
[12] Cited in Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, Chapter 24. Apparently from page 19 of the autobiography of Sarah Elizabeth Manning [James], but not included in the online version previously cited.
[13] Manning James, Jane, Autobiography, online 1 Jun 2014 at http://www.blacklds.org/ manning.
[14] Personal correspondence with Margaret Blair Young, co-author with Darius Aidan Gray of the Standing on the Promises series of historical novels discussing the history of Blacks in early LDS history. At the time of our correspondence, Margaret did not recall the rapist’s name, but conveyed the impression he was a local Connecticut clergyman.
[15] Though Jane does not specify which Burlington she fled to, Burlington, Iowa, is more likely than Burlington, Illinois.
[16] Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery, “Jane Manning James: Black Saint, 1847 Pioneer,” Ensign, online 1 Jun 2014 at https://www.lds.org/ensign/1979/08/jane-manning-james-black-saint-1847-pioneer?lang=eng.
[17] Whipple, Nelson Wheeler, quoted by Connell O’Donovan in “Brigham Young, African Americans, and Plural Marriage: Schism and the Beginnings of Black Priesthood and Temple Denial,” The Persistence of Polygamy, Vol 2, From Joseph Smith’s Martyrdom to the First Manifesto, 1844-1890, John Whitmer Books, 2013, p. 73.
[18] Ham, Shem, and Japeth were sons of Noah, the Bible prophet at the time of the great flood. Shem was believed to be the father of the Semites, or Israelites. Japeth was believed to have been the father of the Whites who were not Israelites. Ham was believed to be the father of the Blacks. Ironically, there is a Black people who have extremely strong Cohenim DNA, indicating that these Black individuals are a literal branch of Israel. Residual racism was still taught when I was a college student in the 1980s. I think a loving God might have kept his Black children from us, until we yearned to have the stain of the ban taken from us. The ban meant we do not have a rich history of White members being actually terrible to their Black brothers. It resembles how a parent might separate two children when one might do irreparable damage to the other. The ban may have been because White members could not be trusted to avoid terrible hatefulness until a later date. I say this as a mixed race child born when it was “void and prohibited” for my parents to marry in the state of my birth.
[19] O’Donovan, Connell, “Black Priesthood and Priesthood Denial,” The Persistence of Polygamy, pp. 60.
[20] The 1850 and 1860 Utah censuses reported 26 and 29 Black slaves, respectively. Enslavement of native Americans was a larger issue. Brigham’s attempt to transmute slavery into indentured servitude as a step towards complete emancipation backfired. Utes started raiding Paiute villages for women and children, who they threaten to kill unless the Mormons “bought” the kidnapped victims. This is how Omer Badigee became the adopted son of Joseph Leland Heywood. A Mormon bought Badigee, saving his life, but did not take care of Badigee. Heywood, finding this situation, relieved the un-named Mormon of responsibility for the boy, brought him to his household, where Omer was bathed, de-loused, and given decent clothes (the rags Omer had been wearing were burned).
[21] “Slavery in Utah” at Utah History to Go, online 2 Jun 2014 at http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/pioneers_and_cowboys/slaveryinutah.html.
[22] Lajean Purcell Carruth, transcription of George D. Watt’s Pittman shorthand notes, presented at the Mormon History Association Conference, June 2014. Cited by Margaret Blair Young on June 11, 2014, online 28 Feb 2017 at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/welcometable/2014/06/a-few-words-from-orson-pratt/.
[23] See Brigham Young addresses, Ms d 1234, Box 48, folder 3, dated Feb. 5, 1852. Also included in Fred C. Collier, The Teachings of Brigham Young.
[24] This is an account I tumbled across in the early days of the internet, which I have been unable to relocate. However it is entirely consistent with the vigil of Mary Fielding [Smith] upon discovering the relocation of her husband’s body. Assuming the account was accurate, it seems likely the Smith brother who may have been buried with Joseph and Hyrum was Samuel.
[25] This controversy continued into the next generation, when Emma’s family resorted to “dousing” in 1928 to locate the lost remains of the brothers. Joseph Fielding Smith, Hyrum’s grandson, was livid that Emma’s family would presume to resort to such means to “locate” the graves, then move the bodies yet again without consulting Hyrum’s descendants. Further, there was suspicion that the bodies had been misidentified, a suspicion which has since been allayed by forensic analysis. See Curtis G. Weber, Skulls and Crossed Bones? A Forensic Study of the Remains of Hyrum and Joseph Smith, online 2 Jun 2014 at http://mormonhistoricsites.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Skulls-and-Crossed-Bones-A-Forensic-Study-of-the-Remains-of-Hyrum-and-Joseph-Smith.pdf. Unbeknownst to Joseph Fielding Smith, the bodies of Joseph and Hyrum had been moved out of Nauvoo from under the beehive burial location just prior to the conflict of September 1846, and subsequently reburied on the grounds of Emma’s home, near a spring house which subsequently was torn down, accounting for the lack of accuracy regarding the final resting place of the remains.
[26] Deseret News article reporting the death and funeral of Jane Manning James on April 16, 1908, cited in Jane Manning James page on Black LDS, online 2 Jun 2014 at http://www.blacklds.org/manning.