The language in the family stories might trace back to the Act in Relation to Service?

Amy, I think that is too direct of a connection that would be difficult to substantiate. I was only trying to give some context to Maurine’s question in #10, and suggest that the law as written required a “servant” to enter the territory of her or his choice and enter a contract with her or his master. As you note, what that actually looked like in practice is an entirely different matter. I’m still stumped by the law, that those who wrote it believed a black person would choose the form of servitude it dictates over freedom. But as the BY quote indicates, he actually believed that the servants would be “better off” in servitude than free. How ever we slice it, Utah still had a form of involuntary servitude which treated black people inferior. And it is important to remember that the 1852 law was designed to provide legal cover for the masters who were already in the territory with their slaves.
So, I’m overly complicating the issue. The most direct answer to Maurine’s #10 is that those coming west were not all freed slaves who willingly accompanied their families. The 1852 law said that they had to enter the territory of their own free will; whether they did or not is an entirely different matter complicated by the fact that there are so few sources from black pioneers themselves.

I just checked again, and I don’t see any of these families listed in any possible Probate Court records, with the exception of two entries which are not detailed as to year or content of the file, so if the law required registration, it looks like they either considered the slaves free, or were ignorant of the provisions of the law, or simply didn’t comply. (Any other possible explanations?)

That said, Brigham Young himself seemed to buy into a qualified paternalism prompted by southern slave masters, that slavery was far from a necessary evil, but a moral good. They were doing for the slaves (providing food and clothing and shelter) things that they were racially incapable of doing for themselves. Young reminded lawmakers that he loathed “the abuses to which the slave in a great many instances is exposed,” but insisted that “[w]hen a master has a Negro, and uses him well, he is much better off than if he was free.”

I’ve heard that myth called the Magnolia Myth: that slavery was a benevolent institution and that the slaves desired to remain with their owners, even after being freed. See, for example, the book and movie Gone With the Wind.

It is curious seeing the myth show up in Utah, since these families left the South in the 1840s and early 1850s, but as I understand it, that myth has been perpetuated by the women of the South, so I suppose it’s fitting to have it turn up in the materials preserved in the collections of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers.

As I read this I wondered about the baptisms of slaves. It seems that the former slaves in this narrative were active members of the Church. Given that the Church stresses free agency, did the slave owners require their slaves to be baptized or allowed their slaves to decide on their own? I’m sure there were all sorts of different approaches to this. If anyone knows more about this I’d be interested.