Could God be using the world to correct the church…

[Anonymous]

Joseph Smith was absolutely ahead of the curve with regards to slavery. I did a post on Joseph’s Presidential Platform of 1844–he advocated compensated emancipation through the sale of public lands. To cope with resulting social stress, he advocated the relocation of the several million freed slaves to Texas. Of course, if Smith’s plan had been accepted, we would have avoided the Civil War. You can read more at http://www.mormonheretic.org/2009/04/21/joseph-smiths-presidential-platform/

Quote:

Josiah Quincy, soon to be mayor of Boston, visited Joseph Smith in the spring of 1844 when this platform was in circulation. Much later, Quincy wrote about that visit, saying that Joseph Smith’s proposal for ending slavery resembled one that Emerson made 11 years later in 1855.

As Quincy put it, writing retrospectively in the 1880s, “We, who can look back upon the terrible cost of the fratricidal war which put an end to slavery, now say that such a solution of the difficulty” – Joseph Smith’s and Emerson’s – “would have been worthy a Christian statesman. But if the retired scholar was in advance of his time when he advocated this disposition of the public property in 1855, what shall I say of the political and religious leader who had committed himself, in print, as well as in conversation, to the same course in 1844?”

I used to be pretty hard on Brigham Young and his stance on slavery. I’m still not comfortable with it. However, there are some other issues that I think are important to consider. First of all, there is the Indian slavery issue. I posted about Indian slavery at http://www.mormonheretic.org/2009/08/10/mormons-and-indians-in-the-great-plains/

Quote:

Stopping the slave trade embittered some Indians. Some of them attempted to sell their children to the Mormons. Jones related one graphic incident. [Indian Chief] Arrapine, Walker’s brother, insisted that because the Mormons had stopped the Mexicans from buying these children, the Mormons were obligated to purchase them. Jones wrote, “Several of us were present when he took one of the children by the heels and dashed his brains out on the hard ground, after which he threw the body toward us telling us we had no hearts or we would have saved its life.”

Incidents such as this led the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah on 7 March 1852 to pass an act legalizing Indian slavery. The purpose was to induce Mormons to buy Indian children who otherwise would have been abandoned or killed.

A friend of mine also said the issue of legalizing slavery may have been a political move for statehood. We should be familiar with the Missouri Compromise in which Free State Kansas and Slave State Missouri joined the Union together so as not to upset the balance of free/slave states. New Mexico wanted to enter the Union as a free state; Utah thought Congress might want to keep the balance of power by having a slave state join the Union at the same time. Sure, it wasn’t the most sound reasoning, but pragmatically, some of these decisions make a bit more sense when we look at some of the other issues of the day.

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