Thinking Like a Historian: Biography as History

1. Joseph Smith’s Plan to End Slavery, February 7, 1844. Like many Americans, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints struggled with the question of slavery. Running for president in 1844, its founder, Joseph Smith, decried the institution.

   Petition, also, ye goodly inhabitants of the slave States, your legislators to abolish slavery by the year 1850, or now. … Pray Congress to pay every man a reasonable price for his slaves out of the surplus revenue arising from the sale of public lands, and from the deduction of pay from the members of Congress. Break off the shackles from the poor black man, and hire him to labor like other human beings; for “an hour of virtuous liberty on earth is worth a whole eternity of bondage.”

2. Orson Hyde on slavery, the Millennial Star, February 15, 1851. Orson Hyde was an important Mormon missionary who, like most Mormons, refused to baptize slaves without their owner’s permission.

   The laws of the land recognize slavery, we do not wish to oppose the laws of the country. … Our counsel to all our ministers in the North and South is, to avoid contention upon the subject, and to oppose no institution which the laws of the country authorize; but to labor to bring men into the Church and Kingdom of God, and teach them to do right, and honor their God in His creatures.

3. Mormon apostle Amasa Mason Lyman and his wives. In 1851, at the behest of Brigham Young, five hundred Mormons — including the Robert Smiths and their slaves — moved to San Bernardino, California. They settled on land purchased from Antonio Maria Lugo, who held the 35,000 acres of the Rancho Bernardino under a Mexican grant, a claim protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) that ended the Mexican War. The settlement’s leader was Amasa Mason Lyman, whom Biddy knew through the Smith family and whose middle name she eventually took for her surname.
   

   Source: George and Sadie Frey Family.
4. Mason v. Smith, 1856 (the Bridget “Biddy” Mason case). Most Mormon migrants to California heeded Brigham Young’s advice to free their slaves, as California was a free state. Robert Smith refused to do so and, in 1855, prepared to move to Texas. However, in 1856, members of the free black community assisted Biddy to file a habeas corpus petition and obtain freedom for herself and her extended family of thirteen women and children. In a later interview, Mason stated: “I feared this trip to Texas since I first heard of it.”

   And it further appearing by satisfactory proof to the judge here, that all of the said persons of color are entitled to their freedom, and are free and cannot be held in slavery or involuntary servitude … And it further appearing to the satisfaction of the judge here that the said Robert Smith intended to and is about to remove from the State of California where slavery does not exist, to the State of Texas, where slavery of Negroes and persons of color does exist, and is established by the municipal laws, and intends to remove the said before-mentioned persons of color, to his own use without the free will and consent of all or any of the said persons of color, whereby their liberty will be greatly jeopardized, and there is good reason to apprehend and believe that they may be sold into slavery or involuntary servitude … and it further appearing that none of the said persons of color can read and write, and are almost entirely ignorant of the laws of the state of California as well as those of the State of Texas, and of their rights and that the said Robert Smith, from his past relations to them as members of his family does possess and exercise over them an undue influence in respect to the matter of their said removal insofar that they have been in duress and not in possession and exercise of their free will so as to give a binding consent to any engagement or arrangement with him.

5. Photograph of Biddy Mason and the deed of her first land purchase, 1866. Once free, Biddy prospered as a midwife and an investor in Los Angeles real estate. When she died in 1891, Biddy had accumulated a fortune of $300,000 (about $7.6 million today). Despite her contact with Mormonism, Biddy Mason never joined the Mormon church. Instead, in 1872 she was a founding member of the first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Los Angeles. An active philanthropist of charitable causes, she funded a traveler’s aid society and an elementary school for black children.
   
   

   Source: Los Angeles Public Library.