I don’t imagine “Grandson” realized he was stepping into a minefield by using a euphemism for slavery.

One of my ancestral lines was closely associated for several years with many of the Southern slave-owning families. (I do wish they’d left an account of their experiences.) They crossed the plains with the Southerners and their slaves, settled in Amasa’s Survey with them, went to San Bernardino with them, but as far back as I’ve seen in their records, back into Colonial times, they were Baptists and Sabbitarians from Rhode Island and New York and although well off, did not own slaves, even though slavery was practiced in New York and Rhode Island. Living in those two states they would have been very familiar with the institution of slavery, as well as the public debate over emancipation.

The New York legislature passed a bill in 1799 called “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” It converted slaves-for-life to “indentured servants,” really the same institution under another name, but also created a system for freeing the children of slaves, and slaves brought into the state from elsewhere. It was a complicated process, and created great social upheaval, including kidnappings, marginalization, and riots.

Slaves were listed in the New York census as long as they were held as slaves and remained in the state, so as I’ve read the 1800 United States Census for Western New York, I’ve seen slaveholding families listed alongside my ancestors.

As Christopher Rich recently explained in his article in the Journal of Mormon History, Brigham Young’s 1851 “Act in Relation to Service” created a similar system. (See here and here.) The act acknowledged the property rights of the Southern slaveholders, but attempted to set up a system of eventual manumission, like the laws that the New York and New England converts would have been familiar with.

The “Act in Relation to Service” was only in effect for a decade before the slaves were freed in the territories in 1862, so it really never did anything. There was only one court case in Utah Territory in regards to slavery during that decade, and it didn’t directly address the provisions of the Act.

* * *

If your Mormon convert ancestors were from the South, including Texas, unless they were dirt poor, with very few exceptions they would have owned slaves. A good percentage of antebellum Southern converts brought slaves with them across the plains. Others sold their slaves before travelling to Utah. I’ve seen many claims of families having freed their slaves in the South, but that was a complicated process, often requiring an act of the state legislature, and I have not yet seen proof that the claim was true in any case.

If your Mormon convert ancestors were from the Mid-Atlantic region, they may have owned slaves before they joined the Church. I am familiar with a New Jersey convert who left a family slave in Pennsylvania when he went West. If a family didn’t own slaves at the time they joined the Church, there’s a chance they may have a generation or more before that. I have not done original research into the families, but I understand that there’s a good chance that my Long Island Dutch ancestors would have owned slaves.

It’s less likely that New England ancestors would have owned slaves, but you may see evidences of the institution, particularly along the coast.

Slavery was a fact of life for many Southerners, one they hedged up and defended with all sorts of scriptural and social justifications. Regardless of all those justifications, using other names to describe the institution, “servants” being the most common, is, as Ardis so elegantly put it, putting lipstick on a pig.

So let’s call it what it was, realize that contrary to what Ezekiel said, our teeth can be set on edge from the sour grapes our ancestors ate, and then treat our family histories with honesty and an acceptance that these people came from different times and places and circumstances, They did not have 21st century ideals or experiences, and it’s a disservice to them and to ourselves to pretend that they did.

Our early Mormon converts came from a wide variety of backgrounds, but were brought together to participate in one of the most amazing and provocative and successful social and religious experiments of the past couple of centuries, so let’s celebrate our heritage and tell our stories honestly.

“Servant-companion”? I’ve seen a few different descriptors used for slaves, but that’s a new one. Mary Ewell used the term “slave” in her autobiography.

My project on the slaves and slave-holding families is ongoing. I have been extremely busy over the past year and have not been able to spend the time on the project that I would have liked, or on my primary project, “The Eminent Women of the St. George Temple.”

There are currently 35 slave-owning individuals or families on my list, and I have done no research yet on the Ewells or Chloe. It looks like all those records need to be found. As I mentioned the other day on the post about the known burial sites for the slaves in Utah Territory, a Burton descendant was able to do all that research on his family, using the types of sources you mention, and came up with some really fascinating results, and I hope to be able to write up that story sometime soon for Keepapitchinin. It really is a cool story, and had to be redemptive in a way for the family.

Bottom line: I will eventually get to the Ewells, but if you are doing research in the meantime, I would of course love to see what you come up with.

Your ancestor-protecting term “servant-companion” offends me; putting lipstick on that linguistic pig doesn’t obscure the fact that Chloe was a slave, not a “servant-companion.”

And your demand — not a courteous request — for the specific types of “documentation” (why the scare quotes?) you will accept is rude, at best. Amy is a master genealogist and knows her sources, but she is not obligated to provide them to some curt stranger before she has claimed them herself in her own professional publication.

You’re very rude, as well as anonymous, and I don’t appreciate your speaking to my colleague the way you have done.

– Ardis E. Parshall, blog owner

I’m currently working on another project involving some of the Mississippi Saints, and I have not yet found any of that large group of early converts who were not related to each other in some way, either by blood or by marriage.

It’s been a fascinating tangent to read more about black history in Utah and learn about the lives of these men and women, some of whom made the trek to Utah by their own choice, but most of whom (despite what family records may say) were taken across the plains involuntarily. It’s been interesting to read the stories and see the lives they made for themselves.

And it would be interesting to find out more about Mary Ann Chandler. She is a bit of a mystery. All I know about her is Chandler family genealogical information and that her brother was buried in St George and left an account of his life in the St George church records.

Here are the sources on Southern migration into Indiana:

Rose, Gregory S. “Upland Southerners: The County Origins of Southern Migrants to Indiana by 1850.” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 82, No. 3, September 1986, pp 242-263. Available at JSTOR.

Lang, Elfrieda. “Southern Migration to Northern Indiana Before 1850.” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 50, No. 4 December 1954, pp. 349-356. Available at JSTOR.

(The Lang article is a little limited in its scope.)

My Morgan family also followed the Kentucky-Indiana-Illinois migration pattern. I wasn’t as familiar with the North Carolina-Indiana route.

One factor which made the Crosby family’s experience different than these others was slavery. Although I tend to be wary of pointing to material on Wikipedia, the article History of Slavery in Indiana is good on this topic.