HE ORGANIZED A PEOPLE TO SURVIVE. HE ALSO DECIDED WHO COULD BELONG.

Brigham Young coordinated a remarkable migration and frontier settlement after real religious persecution, using shared work, irrigation and institutions to build communities. His leadership also concentrated religious and territorial power, defended legally sanctioned servitude, restricted Black religious participation and oversaw settlement that dispossessed Indigenous peoples—showing why cooperation without accountable rights is not the same as liberation.

PEOPLE & POWER · 04 · MONARCHY, EMPIRE & HISTORICAL POWERS

Published by Langhorne P. Breedlove

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2026 · 5:00 AM ET

Tags: Brigham Young · Utah Territory · Mormon Pioneers · Communal Labor · Slavery · Native Sovereignty · Racial Restrictions

The settlers arrived with wagons, tools, tired children and the exceptionally inconvenient problem of building a community where there were no familiar public institutions to do the work for them. They dug ditches, planted fields, laid roads, raised buildings and organized food supplies. Every frontier success required labor. The question is whether the people supplying that labor possessed an equal voice over the authority directing it.

Brigham Young (1801–1877), president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 until his death and Utah's first territorial governor, led a migration after years of persecution and helped establish a durable network of settlements. His history cannot be reduced either to heroic survival or to unchecked domination. It includes extraordinary coordination, religious authority, political centralization, legally protected bondage, unequal religious membership and conflicts with Native peoples. The proletariat lens asks who did the work, who could refuse, and who governed the results. (Sources 01, 02)

ROOTS · PERSECUTION WAS NOT IMAGINARY

Young joined the Latter-day Saint movement in the 1830s. Church members faced expulsion, coercion, property losses and lethal violence in Missouri, later experiencing escalating conflict in Illinois. Joseph Smith was killed in Carthage in 1844. Young emerged as a central leader, and the migration from Nauvoo began in 1846. In 1847 a pioneer vanguard reached the Salt Lake Valley, then part of Mexican territory, before Utah became a U.S. territory. (Sources 01, 02)

The National Park Service's history of the 1846 trek documents hunger, illness, rain, dangerous roads and labor for food along the route. The hardships were real. Yet describing the entire movement as a proletarian revolt would flatten important differences among its members: women and men, leaders and followers, wealthy and poor, free and enslaved, adults and children. Religious persecution can explain why people sought refuge without proving that every institution they built afterward was just. (Source 02)

THE IRRIGATION DITCH WAS A COLLECTIVE PROJECT

Settlers organized irrigation, cultivation, public works, transport and town building under ecclesiastical and civic leadership. A survival economy required shared effort and coordination. Some settlement institutions involved mutual aid and cooperative ventures, but their practices varied across places and decades. Calling every farm or shop communally owned would be incorrect; private property, trade, church tithes, contracts and distinct forms of cooperative production coexisted.

Collective work can improve resilience: a household may not be able to build a diversion ditch, road or meetinghouse alone. But the existence of a communal project does not answer how its burdens and rewards were assigned. Who could decline an assignment? Who held title? Who managed supplies? Who received credit for women's unpaid household and caregiving work? A fair accounting credits settlers' labor without treating its principal organizer as the sole producer of the settlement.

TWO OFFICES, ONE CENTER OF AUTHORITY

Young combined leadership of his church with formal political power as U.S.-appointed territorial governor beginning in 1851. The territorial legislature was heavily composed of Latter-day Saints, and ecclesiastical authority influenced many civic decisions. Those institutional overlaps helped coordinate settlement and made dissent difficult when a leader's influence extended across worship, community reputation and government. (Sources 01, 03)

This was not absolute sovereignty: Congress created Utah Territory and federal officials and judges exercised authority too, sometimes in direct conflict with Young and local leaders. Nor was it a system in which every order came down to a completely powerless population. Members negotiated, debated, resisted and created institutions. The analytic question is whether ordinary dissenters enjoyed protections independent of religious leadership—not whether their lives consisted only of obedience.

1852 · UTAH PUT SERVITUDE INTO LAW

On February 4, 1852, Utah Territory adopted An Act in Relation to Service, signed by Governor Young. University of Utah researchers examining newly transcribed legislative debates found contested terms and a statute that authorized servitude arrangements involving enslaved African Americans and certain immigrant laborers. The legislation's language and application were debated even by participants; describing it simply as modern employment regulation conceals its role in sanctioning bondage. (Source 03)

The National Park Service documents Young's public defense of slavery and his support for legal recognition of enslaved Black people in the territory. He argued in the legislative debate that slavery could be acceptable under his interpretation of scripture and social order. Young's support is historically grounded even though slavery was not the dominant source of Utah's total agricultural labor. (Source 04)

That distinction exposes the contradiction at the heart of the original draft. Religious refugees who valued their own freedom could legally accommodate the continued unfreedom of other people. The existence of external persecution did not make the system's racial boundaries disappear.

NATIVE CHILDREN AND THE LANGUAGE OF PROTECTION

The 1852 territorial Act for the Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners permitted white residents holding certain Native children and women, whether obtained by purchase or otherwise, to secure judicial indentures lasting as long as twenty years under statutory conditions. Its supporters presented the law as a protective intervention in an existing captive trade. Its legal design also authorized profound coercion over Native lives, families and labor. (Source 05)

The University of Utah's documentary project traces the law to controversies involving traders, prisoners and the territorial legislature, including disagreements among Latter-day Saint leaders. This history should not be reduced to an assertion that Young single-handedly invented every form of regional captive trading, or that the protective rhetoric made the resulting indentures consensual. Both the earlier trade and the territorial government's responsibility deserve examination. (Sources 05, 06)

1852 · A RACIAL BARRIER TO RELIGIOUS POWER

In speeches to the Utah legislature in January and February 1852, Young articulated a restriction barring Black men of African descent from priesthood ordination. Some Black men, including Elijah Abel and Q. Walker Lewis, had been ordained earlier. The church's own historical account identifies Young's 1852 announcement and states that the restriction was later extended in temple practice, remaining until 1978. (Sources 07, 08)

The church today disavows past racial theories used to justify those restrictions. Its present doctrine and membership practices should not be described as identical to Young's nineteenth-century policy. But the historical action matters precisely because eligibility for spiritual authority also determined who could hold institutional standing within a community where church and civic power were closely connected. (Source 07)

The practical exclusion did not end with a private prejudice. It became an organized rule. A cooperative community that requires some members to obey while excluding them from particular positions of authority has not made participation equal simply by organizing its ditch digging collectively.

WHOSE VALLEY WAS BEING SETTLED?

The Salt Lake Valley and surrounding Great Basin were homelands of Indigenous peoples, including Shoshone, Ute, Goshute and Paiute communities with distinct political relationships, territories, livelihoods and histories. Calling the region an empty refuge erases the people already there. New settlements transformed land use, water access, wildlife, farming and mobility, often creating conflict as settlers expanded.

The Utah Legislature's historical report on Utah Lake documents the 1849 founding of Fort Utah near the Timpanogos, rising tensions and the killing of a Timpanogos man known as Old Bishop by settlers in 1850. After subsequent conflicts, Young authorized militia action against hostile Timpanogos men without initially having been told the settler killing that contributed to the crisis. The report is a reminder that decisions about military force cannot be separated from the events local leaders concealed or the Native people affected. (Source 09)

Some religious settlers experienced expulsion and then participated in colonization of land that Indigenous nations already used and governed. These histories are not mutually exclusive. A people can be persecuted in one place and become a dispossessing power in another. The question of rights does not vanish when the new arrivals are themselves survivors of injustice.

MOUNTAIN MEADOWS · RESPONSIBILITY WITHOUT INVENTED ORDERS

In September 1857, southern Utah militiamen, assisted by some Native recruits, massacred about 120 emigrants at Mountain Meadows. The church's historical study attributes planning and implementation to local Latter-day Saint militia and civic leaders. An express letter from Young telling them not to interfere with the emigrants arrived after the killings. The available evidence does not justify stating as proven fact that Young ordered the massacre. (Source 10)

That is not the end of institutional scrutiny. The same historical account acknowledges that the intense rhetoric of Young and other leaders during the Utah War contributed to a climate of fear and suspicion. Higher leaders may bear responsibility for conditions, instructions or failures of oversight even when an allegation of a specific secret order is unsupported. Accountability becomes stronger when it follows the evidence instead of replacing it with a convenient villain. (Source 10)

SURVIVAL, DISSENT AND THE COST OF LEAVING

The draft argues that Young's authority could make dissent expensive. That is a defensible structural question in an interdependent settlement where religious affiliation, marriage, local commerce and public authority overlapped. But claims that movement, wages or every marriage were uniformly controlled by a single order would require distinct evidence for each time, place and legal mechanism. There were varying practices, differing household resources and actual conflicts with dissenters.

A sustainable cooperative institution needs more than shared production. It needs understandable rules, independent means of resolving disputes, the freedom to criticize leadership and protections that do not disappear when someone changes beliefs. Community solidarity can offer enormous practical benefits while making those protections more—not less—necessary.

THE FEDERAL CONFLICT DID NOT MAKE ONE SIDE INNOCENT

In 1857 President James Buchanan sent federal troops to Utah after disputes over the territorial government's relationship to federal authority. Young declared martial law and prepared resistance, amid fears that earlier expulsions might be repeated. The resulting Utah War sharpened local anxieties and exposed the friction between federal rule and the close church-state relationship in the territory. (Source 10)

The federal government's conduct deserves its own examination, including how officials interpreted territorial loyalty and religious difference. But criticizing federal overreach does not erase Utah's servitude statutes, racial exclusions or Indigenous land conflicts. A frontier community's demand for autonomy and an individual worker's or Native nation's demand for autonomy are different claims that can collide.

THE ECONOMIC PARADOX OF COOPERATIVE HIERARCHY

Young's settlement model shows that coordination and redistribution within a group can coexist with unequal voice, coercive law and exclusion at its boundaries. A well-functioning irrigation network may benefit families who depend on it. That benefit is not a defense of indenturing another family's child, restricting Black religious authority or removing Native communities from critical resources.

The counterargument must also be stated: defenders emphasize the severity of persecution, the logistical feat of migration, the construction of communities and institutions and the difficulty of administering an isolated territory. Those achievements were not imaginary. The response is to assess achievements and harms together, rather than treat the former as evidence that the latter did not occur.

THE ONE-YEAR AND TEN-YEAR PUBLIC LEDGER

This is a historical biography, not an appropriations bill. Claims about modern costs of land restoration, archives, public education or community infrastructure would need defined beneficiaries, specific legal authority, a current baseline and credible funding assumptions. It would be misleading to assign a single price to 'Brigham Young's system' in modern federal dollars.

Illustrative arithmetic only: suppose a Tribal-led regional history and land-access initiative funded five partnerships at $2 million each in year one plus $2 million for independent research and records access. That would be $12 million in hypothetical first-year gross spending. If its next nine years required $7 million annually, the flat undiscounted ten-year total would be $75 million. This is an invented accounting example, not a restitution award, a needs assessment or a program adopted by any government.

WHY BRIGHAM YOUNG MATTERS IN 2026

His legacy raises institutional questions that extend beyond religion. What does mutual aid accomplish when neighbors share labor? Who sets the terms of that sharing? Can members disagree without losing access to the community's essential institutions? Does a government's protective claim apply equally to people outside its majority? And how are Indigenous land and political rights respected when new settlements expand?

These questions can be examined without making an accusation against contemporary Latter-day Saints or imagining all religious cooperation is authoritarian. People continue to create community institutions for charitable, educational and economic purposes under profoundly different modern legal arrangements. The relevant standard concerns consent, accountable power and rights that do not depend on obedience.

The pioneers dug the ditches. Their labor mattered. So did the lives of the Black and Indigenous people denied equal standing in the society built around them. A community can deserve credit for surviving persecution without acquiring the right to decide whose freedom is negotiable.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

01 · Encyclopaedia Britannica — Brigham Young; religious leadership, migration and Utah governorship.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Brigham-Young

02 · National Park Service — The 1846 Trek, Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail; migration and hardship.

https://home.nps.gov/mopi/learn/historyculture/the-1846-trek.htm

03 · University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library — An Act in Relation to Service; 1852 debates, immigrant indentures and African American slavery.

https://exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/this-abominable-slavery/page/an-act-in-relation-to-service

04 · National Park Service — Utah: Slaves and Saints, Chapter 1, Race, Slavery and Freedom; Brigham Young and 1852 slavery law.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/chapter-1-race-slavery-and-freedom-utah-slaves-and-saints.htm

05 · University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library — A Preamble and An Act for the Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners; 1852 primary statute.

https://exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/this-abominable-slavery/item/145774

06 · University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library — The Trial of Don Pedro León Luján; historical context for Native servitude laws.

https://exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/this-abominable-slavery/page/The-Trial-of-Don-Pedro-Leon-Lujan

07 · Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — Race and the Priesthood; 1852 racial restriction, subsequent history and 1978 change.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng

08 · University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library — Brigham Young Articulates Racial Priesthood Restriction, February 5, 1852; archival transcript.

https://exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/this-abominable-slavery/page/4_2

09 · Utah Legislature — History of Utah Lake, 2022 legislative report; Fort Utah, Old Bishop and the Timpanogos conflict.

https://le.utah.gov/interim/2022/pdf/00001652.pdf

10 · Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — Mountain Meadows Massacre: Historical topic, records and 2008 research synthesis.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/mountain-meadows-massacre?lang=eng

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