Thanks for stopping by, Margaret and for the interesting anecdote.

When we filmed our documentary interviws, Newell Bringhurst had one moment of rolling his eyes and exclaiming, “Brigham Young was such a racist!” It was an entertaining moment, but not one we included in the completed doc.

It might behoove believing Mormons to petition to have this unique sealing ritual canceled.

Oh! I just thought of something else! (Here comes my Homosexual Agenda:) If the LDS sealing power is expansive and elastic enough to seal a black servant to Joseph and his household for eternity, is it not likewise expansive and elastic enough to do something far more positive and affirming by sealing Gay and Lesbian couples together, so they too can join the cosmological LDS priesthood family?

Now as I mentioned JS and other early Mormon’s ordained black people. The point of this post is to make some sense of beliefs of the Mormons who brought the restriction into place and then maintained it. The idea that the narrative was invented out of thin air because of racism not only doesn’t jibe with the documents of our past, but it isn’t helpful, I think, in learning from that past.

The LDS religion rejects the Catholic idea of “Original Sin” by deeming that all children are born blameless, yet, for most of it’s history also adhered to the idea that if you were born with skin too dark, you were to be excluded from parts of their org.

It is really hard to see it for anything else than original racist ideas perpetuated until the civil rights environment in the US occurred.

Your second comment is important Connell, and I appreciate it. That whole episode in the temple is brutal. The reason I make the claim that they didn’t view black people as eternally servants is because they do virtually all agree that black people will eventually be integrated into the priesthood network at some point in the future. I agree that their positions regarding black people in this life and in the immediate future was not so encouraging.

Also JS himself may have been the one who was reticent about marrying Jane since he had said he would “confine them to their own species” (is that the right wording?) and had fined two black men in Nauvoo for attempting to marry white women. JS was apparently very kind to Jane but may have been sqeemish about marriage.

J., as for James’s singular eternal servitude sealing of May 19, 1894, I think you too easily dismiss (or at least mollify) church leaders’ racism as a motive for officiating at it. I believe Wilford Woodruff and his 2nd Counselor Joseph F. Smith (who officiated and stood as posthumous proxy for his uncle) BOTH only saw people of African descent as divinely-appointed, eternal servants AND this racist sealing ritual was the only way to link Jane James to Joseph without tainting the Smith “priesthood family” with her black blood.

As for integration into Joseph’s priesthood family, I must point out that this ad hoc ritual did not “attach” Jane James to just Joseph Smith. The 1894 ceremonial wording twice connected Jane to Smith’s entire family as a “Servitor for eternity” and lastly, Jane was pronounced to be “a Servitor to the Prophet Joseph Smith…and to his household for all eternity.” Thus Jane literally was made an eternal servant to Joseph Smith, all his 33 (plus?) wives, all his biological children, his several civilly adopted children, all the scores of women who were posthumously sealed to Joseph Smith, all their children, and to all the men and women who were sealed by proxy to Joseph Smith as his adoptive children – that vast web of priesthood family that Smith conjured in his cosmology is now to be serviced for eternity by one black woman.

I find the following elements particularly troubling:

1) Holding it in the temple when other sealings had been done all across the plains, on Ensign Peak, and Brigham Young’s office – even after the Salt Lake Endowment House was dedicated; this prevented Jane James from physically being present herself
2) Instead, the minutes report, “Bathsheba W. Smith as proxy for Jane Elizabeth Manning James (living)”. Why Bathsheba and not one of Smith’s five surviving plural wives? Bathsheba W. Bigler Smith was a southerner, born in Virginia (a slave state), whose mother, Susanna Ogden Bigler, had grown up in a wealthy, slave-owning family
3) Jane (via Bathsheba) was admonished to “be obedient to him [Joseph] in all things in the Lord,” further enunciating her inferior position to Smith
4) The general Mormon attitude was that theologically, cosmologically Blacks could only be cursed, as with their ancestor Cain, to be “servants of servants” – barbers, hotel porters, maids, footmen, cooks, laundresses, etc. They could be allowed to wield no sacerdotal or civic administrative authority over anyone white, regardless. Thus the anger of Augusta Adams Cobb (second plural wife of Brigham Young) when she was a servant to a woman she only referred to as “Mrs. G.” – in September 1852 she wrote to Brigham, “last winter I felt as if I was a servant to servants for if the blood of Cain is not in Mrs. G. I will never try to guess again, if I can help it.”

Understandably Jane was at best not satisfied with this unparalleled temple ritual, and just months renewed her petition “to admit her to Temple ordinances,” which reached the First Presidency on August 22, 1895.

I do have two comments – both lengthy so I will split them into two posts.

First, I don’t believe that Emma originally asked Jane to be adopted to her and Joseph as a child, although in 1893 that’s what Jane believed retroactively, when she dictated her autobiography – or at least what she wanted others to believe. Given the context of when and where Emma’s request was made, I believe it is likely that Emma approached Jane to be sealed to Joseph as a wife, not a child. Jane herself admitted that she did not understand at the time the request that Emma made.

I don’t believe any others were adopted to Joseph and Emma while he was alive, since the adoptive sealing was allegedly the highest temple ordinance performed and it must be officiated within a temple proper.

Were others asked by Emma to be adopted to them? No. But note that she did ask other women – in fact the Partridge and Lawrence sisters who were living with Jane – to be sealed to Joseph as “his Spiritual.”

Why else would Jane have turned Emma down? I suppose she could have been afraid that if she were in fact “adopted” to Joseph and Emma that she would lose her connection to her own mother and step-father (Cato Treadwell) who were both there in Nauvoo. Did Jane then misinterpret Emma or did she just not want to be sealed to Joseph as a wife? The latter seems far more likely. Then once temples had been constructed in Utah, Jane resurrected Emma’s request. But if Joseph had asked her to be sealed to him as a Spiritual, what would the clearly anti-miscegenist church leaders have thought of her request? With utter disgust and contempt most likely. I can thus easily see her modifying the story to be about an adoptive sealing, which had become so prominent in the temples at that time.