Scott H. Partridge, ed., The Thirteenth Apostle: The Diaries of Amasa M. Young, 1832-1877 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2016).

Amasa Lyman is a difficult person to situate within the Mormon tradition. On the one hand, he was a fervent believer, a devoted follower of Joseph Smith, a dogged defender of the gospel, a diligent pioneer, and a committed diary keeper. Yet his life was also full of quixotic divergences from the mainstream as well as substantial complications. The very title of this new volume of Lyman’s diaries hints at his liminal status: The Thirteenth Apostle. Lyman was called as an apostle when Orson Pratt was temporarily dropped from the quorum, but when Pratt was restored Lyman was stuck as a thirteenth wheel. He was then called to the First Presidency when Joseph Smith wanted to drop Sidney Rigdon, but when the latter didn’t happen the former was left in limbo. Lyman’s very ecclesiastical position highlighted an inability to fit in. With the publication of his diaries, Scott Partridge and the staff at Signature Books have provided us an important entrypoint not only into Lyman’s odd life, but also the community whose boundaries he frequently tested.

After decades of frequent missionary, scouting, and leadership expeditions between his conversion in the early 1830s and 1863, Lyman’s liminality became an issue once more once he settled in Utah. He was called upon to defend his unorthodox positions—he preached a famous sermon in which he said Christ’s divinity was not necessary for the exaltation of man—and after he was stripped of his apostleship and later excommunicated from the Church he became a prominent spiritualist and leader in a dissident liberal Mormon body in Salt Lake City. He participated in a number of seances, communed with dead spirits like Joseph Smith, and lectured in public halls. He was a thorn in the side of the LDS institution while still living in their midst. All but one of his eight plural wives left him (though one passed away before the episode), and his son, Francis, became an LDS apostle shortly after Amasa’s death. The renegade figure’s story would not be completely righted until 1904 when his membership, priesthood, and apostleship were restored—by Joseph F Smith, the man who had in 1867 replaced Lyman in the quorum, no less. Talk about life on the frontier.

This volume reproduces entries from all of Lyman’s diaries, with a few exceptions. Partridge understandably did not copy all the mathematical and grammar insertions. (Lyman used his diaries for several purposes.) And there are inexplicably no diaries that cover the years surrounding Lyman’s heresy trial and drop from the quorum. It is very difficult to contemplate that that period, of all the periods in Lyman’s life, was the period he didn’t keep a record. But whether he truly chose to take a break from his diaries, or whether something else happened to them, they do not exist in the public record. While Partridge’s project was underway the LDS Church History Library, who possess the original volumes, have uploaded scans of a majority of the entries. (This in no way decreases the convenience of having them in a transcribed, printed copy, of course.)

A majority of the diary entries through 1868 capture the tedious details of life on the road as a missionary. They are mostly terse and with the most bare observations. Yet once Lyman settled in Utah, and especially after he became a leader in a dissenting spiritualist church, the material becomes far more interesting. On May 8, 1870, he “announced to [his family] my intention to resume preaching the [Godbe] gospel.” The news “gave them much pain” (614). Though Partridge claims this spiritualist movement was a “fad” in the broader American community (xxi), it was actually a strong and tangible cultural feature. The many popular seance meetings in Salt Lake City were merely one part of a much larger web of spiritualist belonging. Especially after the Civil War, where Americans experienced death and loss like never before, many turned to this new mode of communication that supposedly transcended death. Therefore, Lyman’s detailed accounts should be of immense interest to scholars of American religion who aim to trace this phenomenon in its many expressions.

Some of the reports of these spiritualist encounters were mundane, like “Received some words purporting to come from Joseph Smith through Mr [John M.] Spear” (624), but as Lyman became more converted to the process the accounts became much more detailed. In one seance Theodore Turley received guidance from his deceased daughter “in regard to treating the cancer with which he is afflicted” (639). In another, Joseph Smith channeled a woman in order to affirm that “humanity will be lifted up from their narrowmimdedness” as a result of Lyman’s new, liberal church (640). Some messages are received through knocking, and some spiritual visitors complain about their medium’s inability to cooperate. Scholars of spiritual mediums will be rewarded with the rich detail Lyman provides of these practices.

There are a number of other noteworthy elements in the book. One fascinating thread to chase is Joseph Smith’s son, David Hyrum, who traveled to Utah to convert Mormons to the RLDS faith but was instead converted by Lyman to spiritualism (710-716). Another is Lyman’s fraught relationship with his family, as some children remained close to him after his “apostasy” while others shunned him and reaffirmed their allegiance to the church. Lyman’s entries concerning his family are certainly sparse, but there is enough there to reconstruct an important gendered picture of the Lyman household(s).

But perhaps the most exciting tale woven within Lyman’s diaries, at least to me, is that it provides material with which we can reconstruct a dissenting and liberal culture that flourished in Salt Lake City just down the street from Brigham Young’s headquarters. Territorial Utah, even when Young was in charge, was far from the tyrannical environment typically depicted. On the very same blocks where general church meetings were held there were also seances, dissenting rallies, and apostate lectures. Utah’s capital was a much more diverse and pluralistic space than Mormon leaders wanted people to believe.

That said, readers will have to slog through a lot of tedious material to get to the good stuff. The decision to publish the diaries in total made the volume both long and dense. One might argue that it would have been more useful to be more selective on what was included—which would have allowed them to include selected letters and sermons, as originally envisioned—but that would have been a different project. Given the framework they chose, Thirteenth Apostle is a wonderful resource. Scholars of Mormon missionary work, leadership dynamics, territorial Utah, and dissenting traditions will be well rewarded by engaging this excellent collection.

This isn’t your grandparents’ antebellum South. A generation ago it was common for historians to talk about the “regressing” southern states in the decades preceding Civil War. The advent of democracy, the spread of enlightenment, and the triumph of free labor left slaveholders reeling and the slave institution crumbling. Secession, this narrative emphasized, was the last-ditch effort of a flailing boxer on the ropes. But scholarship from the past couple decades have put that myth to rest. Michael O’Brien demonstrated that southerners were intellectuals who contemplated the most sophisticated issues of modernity. Edward Baptist showed how the slave institution increased in strength as the financial staple in America’s capitalistic order. Walter Johnson and Sven Beckert displayed how slaveholders were at the forefront of an increasingly global economy. These and many other works all point to the same crucial revision: slaveholding southerners were “modern,” and their ideas and actions cannot be merely dismissed as remnants of an antiquated age.

Now Matthew Karp, in his new book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard UP), teases out how this reviled cast of characters were also at the center of modern international relations and foreign affairs. It is important, he notes, “to fathom [Southerners’] intentions and to take an accurate measure of their strength” by providing “not only an ideological but also an institutional account of proslavery internationalism” (4). Representing the slave power had global implications, and so we must grapple with the imprint they left on state power in the international world. A vast majority of Secretaries of State, Secretaries of War, and foreign diplomats prior to 1860 came from southern cultures and maintained southern interests. The desire to not only preserve but expand the slave power was central to how they cultivated international relations. After Britain announced emancipation in 1833, a move that would send shock waves throughout the Atlantic World, American southerners groped for an appropriate response. The British Empire now posed a serious thread to both the global system of slavery as well as their economic stronghold, and a number of skirmishes involving slave ships stoked the rumors, but it would have been a mistake to wage war on the imperial power. Instead, they came up with what Karp calls the “foreign policy of slavery”: forcefully represent their interests on the national stage, bolster its military capacity, and support fellow slaveholding nations throughout the Western Hemisphere. Prepare for battle, but avoid war at all costs. Whereas southern states-rights-focused politicians expressed wariness over federal power, some were leading the charge for centralizing policies like expanding the navy—a reversal John Quincy Adams rightly identified as coming “reeking hot from the furnace of slavery” (34). America’s pro-slavery empire required a robust defense.

But this argument over the expansion of naval power, the focus of chapter two, hints at a deeper current throughout this book: how large and coherent was this body of southern elites devoted to foreign supremacy? Like any good historian, Karp hedges his language with language like “a vigorous military wing of he southern foreign policy,” but the extent of pervasiveness is still in limbo (33). Virginian Abel Parker Upshur, the Secretary of the Navy, did indeed have these grand visions, but almost none of it was accomplished in his few years in office. Karp may be right that this “emergence of southern navalism,” though short-lived, helped “to broaden their view of federal powers” (48), but the question remains “who” and “to what extent?” This international mission of slaveholding imperialism never seemed to be as widespread as the book’s most provocative passages seems to let on, as a tight circle of participants are almost always center stage. And even amongst this cadre of elite politicians, their ideas and policies seemed neither fully consistent nor cohesive. In trying to make these southern internationalists exceptionally modern, it is tempting to impose our own sense of modern coherence. But even if there was no systematic “foreign policy of slavery,” the underlying tensions were clearly apparent and require this type of analysis.

This problem of cohesion fades as the book moves more into the late 1840s and 1850s, when more concrete events and initiatives force a more collaborative slaveholding response. Even as they held the threat of abolitionist Britain at bay, they sought to strengthen ties with an bolster the slaveholding chops of Texas, Cuba, and Brazil. The latter two countries were especially important, because if the global emancipation efforts ceased slave labor in those locations, many believed America was soon to follow. Such a prospect had to be stopped at all costs. Even diplomat Henry Wise’s attack on the African slave trade in Brazil, according to Karp, was centered on his efforts to preserve slavery within the nation. The annexation of Texas, identified as “the quintessential achievement of the foreign policy of slavery” (100), is cast as a play to save a “slaveholding republic” from Britain’s abolitionist intrigue. The Mexican/American War is also seen as the staging ground for pro-slavery imperialists testing the power of a federal army. (To do so, of course, Karp has to spend a lot of words explaining why Calhoun, an otherwise stalwart figure of the pro-slavery expansionists, verbally denounced President Polk’s actions in Mexico. The result is not fully persuasive.) With the strength of the federal structure and the wealth of the cotton system, the slaveholding empire seemed strong indeed.

Even in the 1850s, when domestic debates and divisions seemed to doom southern slaveholders, many grew increasingly optimistic. The growth of free trade, Britain’s economic troubles, and South America’s slave profits were interpreted as good omens for slavery’s future. To elite southerners, coerced labor was not a antiquated relic under siege but the foundation for a modern, global industry—it was interwoven with new scientific progress, not antagonistic toward it. One reason they were so frustrated with the sectional battles was that it took attention away from the imperial scene–they were much more interested in extending state power through the purchase of Cuba than the divisive topic of Nebraska. The latter was a small potato compared to the former. What made Lincoln’s election in 1860 so threatening was not just that southern slaveholders, for the first time, lost control of state and foreign power, but also because the powerful system they had spent decades building could now be turned directly back on them as a global antislavery force. Their scheme had backfired. In response, southern states seceded and aimed to create a new centralized state that revolved around slavery and embraced the global capitalist order. “Secession did not produce a flight away from central authority,” Karp explains, “but the eager embrace of a new and explicitly proslavery central authority” (244). The myth of a states-rights agenda has never appeared so vanquished.

The implications of This Vast Southern Empire‘s tale are broad, besides cementing Karp as one of the leading young scholars of nineteenth century American politics. Pro-slavery southerners were not opposing modernity as much as they were trying to shape it. In reading Karp’s book I kept think of the closing and haunting line of my PhD advisor’s magnum opus, wherein he claimed historians have consciously rejected “the insight that the Old South had chosen its own way with clarity of mind, had even understood things about the intractability of the human condition, and had done much consistent with the later trajectory of the American Republic, which usefully flattered itself that aristocracy, illiberalism, and rapacity had died in 1865 and could be killed” (1202). Indeed, especially in the election year of 2016 we should be well aware that notions of progress and modernity are unstable. And so grappling with the quixotic confederate south once again forces us to deal with trenchant tensions within our culture that still refuse to die.