Benjamin E. Park

Today I’m catching a plane to St. Louis, followed by driving a rental car up to Nauvoo. I’m excited. Well, I’m always excited to visit Nauvoo, but I’m especially excited to head up there this weekend to present a paper in the annual John Whitmer Historical Association conference. JWHA is a fun organization dedicated to tracing the history of Mormonism’s many divergent branches. You can find the program here.

I will be presenting a paper on how power operated in Nauvoo. More specifically, I’ll be arguing that gender played a mostly underrepresented role in the city’s political culture. Here’s a taste from the introduction:

Why weren’t women allowed in the Council of Fifty? This seems like an odd question to ask. But I’d argue the answer isn’t as apparent as you’d think. In a way, this paper is a long answer to that seemingly simple question.

Scholars of Mormon Nauvoo often create their historical figures after their own likeness and image, male and female. The story about male Nauvoo concerns visions of deification, tampering with elections, introduction of secret rituals, manipulating the economy, and establishing a theocracy. In short, it’s a story about power. The story about female Nauvoo is about the disruption of domesticity, the practice of ritual healing, the formation of the Relief Society, and the acceptance (or rejection) of polygamy, all of which relied upon working within a patriarchal framework. In short, it’s a story about submission. The separate spheres model is seen in comprehensive overviews of the city, as they are mostly structured around framing questions that requires the Relief Society to receive its own, segregated, chapter. It is also prevalent in how we conceptualize how power operated in Nauvoo, since we generally conceive of it in a way in which power flowed in a single direction.

But historical models that fail to recognize the dynamic interplay between men and women in Mormonism’s Nauvoo project tell an imperfect story. Or, at least, an incomplete story…I want to show how the Relief Society’s actions in Nauvoo played a significant role in stories typically seen as predominantly male: electoral politics and the Council of Fifty. Neither of these two topics—the creation of a controversial political system that infuriated non-Mormon neighbors and the formation of a clandestine theocratic body destined to rule the world—typically feature many female voices. But I’d like to show that neither of these developments can be properly understood without demonstrating the role that female involvement played in both these initiatives. And more specifically for my purposes, I want to demonstrate that the way gendered power operated in Nauvoo did not work in a direct path, but rather in a cursory—and sometimes circular—pattern.

What makes me even more excited is I get to deliver this paper in the Red Brick Store, a recreation of the same building in which the Relief Society was formed. Should be a fun time.

To celebrate Constitution Day, Americans often proclaim their reverence for their nation’s founding document. But to play contrarian, I thought I would highlight some of its discontents.

Mormons today are recognized as some of the most patriotic citizens. And rightfully so: part of their canon of scripture includes God claiming he had “established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.” LDS leaders in recent decades have nearly sacralized the document, some saying it is kin to scripture. As part of the Utah region’s merging with American conservative culture, members of the Mormon faith are as committed to the idea of Constitution as much as any other red-blooded patriot.

But that has not always been the case. In fact, the Mormons are one of the few groups in American history who sought to explicitly replace the Constitution with something new.

The year was 1844, and the place was Nauvoo, Illinois. The Mormons were facing increasing pressure, both internally and externally, from those who believed they were too divergent from acceptable political boundaries. They failed, non-Mormons argued, to assimilate into America’s democratic culture. In response, Joseph Smith and his closest advisors tried any possible mechanism at their disposal. They petitioned federal congress; they explored fragile legal maneuvers; proclaimed Smith’s own presidential candidacy; they organized a clandestine government-in-embryo; and, on April 18th, they debated a new political constitution that would replace America’s fallen polity.

This new constitution took a long time to be written. On March 11th, at the first official gathering for the Council of Fifty, a theocratic political structure organized in Smith’s final year, they resolved “to draft a constitution which should be perfect, and embrace those principles which the constitution of the United States lacked.” A newly-formed committee worked feverishly to meet the demand. The task was harder than they expected. Committee members continually requested more time at the council’s weekly gatherings. It was one thing to critique the Constitution, and another to replace it. At one point William Phelps, a spokesman for the committee, stated “that inasmuch as we have a lawgiver appointed of heaven[,] he was anxious that the committee could have his assistance to prepare the document.” Couldn’t the prophet just reveal the text for a perfected government? Smith demurred, and the committee worked on.

They finally brought a draft of at least a the first portion on April 18th. “We, the people of the Kingdom of God,” it started. The first three words reflected the document they sought to replace, but the following clause represented the revelatory authority upon which their government was to be based. Indeed, their primary critique of the American government was that it lacked “the voice of Jehovah.” Their revised version was bereft of specifics but emphatic on principle: governments were only successful when they were based on God’s authority. No other government “acknowledge[d] the creator of the Universe as their Priest, Lawgiver, King and sovereign,” and they were therefore bound to fail. Besides the extensive condemnation of the world’s apostate empires, the Mormon constitution featured three articles: the first declared God the ruler of all mankind, the second reaffirmed the authority of God’s prophet and priesthood, and the third dictated the necessity of righteous judges who “shall condemn the guilty, and let the innocent go free!” The particulars for governance were absent, but the principles were overwhelming.

But, alas, even that inchoate constitution would not be enough. Unsatisfied with the drafted text, Smith explained that any written constitution would be too rigid to contain the word of God and leadership of his prophets. A week later he dictated a revelation that declared, “ye [the council] are my constitution, and I am your god, and ye are my spokesmen.” God’s kingdom would be governed by priesthood leadership rather than formulated text. Changing circumstances were too fleeting and constant to be met by a single text. Ironically, given modern Mormonism’s conservative bent, Joseph Smith’s political theology held no room for a static originalism. One of the constitution’s authors, Parley Pratt, later said he willing burnt up their feeble attempt. An entire month’s work went up in smoke.

The saints weren’t the only people in American history who critiqued the Constitution for failing to embody God’s word. Evangelicals during the founding period contested it as a “godless constitution.” Both abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates claimed the Constitution failed to enshrine god-given rights. When the Confederate States of America was formed, its authors corrected their former government’s wrongs by directly inserting God into their new constitution’s first sentence. On the Union side, petitioners requested Abraham Lincoln to add a “God amendment” to their governing text. There have always been attempts to make the “godless constitution” a little more godly.

But even if popular interpretations of the Constitution, including those from modern-day Mormons, have continuously been tinged with a religious hue, the text itself remains a testament to a particularly secular state. Its origins was part of a revolutionary age that removed governance away from the religious realm and toward a more civic basis for natural rights. Its introduction of religious pluralism and rejection of religious establishment provided the foundations for both a deeply devotional culture, with religious affiliation rates that outpace those in Europe, as well as a profoundly profane political structure. The Constitution has withstood numerous attempts to sacralize it as a divine document, including that by the Mormons in 1844, only to remain resolute in 2017. While clear and present threats indeed surround it in our own day, one can take hope in the challenges that have circled it before.

Joseph Smith was earnest when he believed the Constitution required the presence of the “voice of Jehovah”; however, it appears that America’s vibrant religiosity is dependent upon its absence.

[Some of this text and parts of its context come from my work-in-progress, Democracy’s Discontents: A Story of Politics, Polygamy, and Power in Mormon Nauvoo. I wrote more about the Council of Fifty in this essay. For more on the Mormon constitution, see Nathan Oman’s article in this essay collection.  The constitution itself is found in the Council of Fifty minutes, published in this volume.]

It takes a lot to be surprised in the Age of Trump. In reality, we shouldn’t be surprised by anything at this point. But Trump announcing the gradual end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was a real punch in the gut for many, including myself. While he ran an explicitly xenophobic campaign that included calls to immediately end the policy, his tone had seemed to change since the election. (Some reporting claims this is due to a long conversation with Obama before the inauguration.) But lacking any substantial political victories in his first year in the White House, his administration yearned for something that could reaffirm his base. (Not to mention the fact that his choice for Attorney General was unlikely to defend DACA once conservative state AGs brought the program to court.) The action brought swift denouncement, both from the right and left, and will likely continue through next Spring. Given congress’s track record of passing anything substantial these days, it appears 800,000 brave Dreamers are in jeopardy.

As expected, many universities immediately spoke out against Trump’s decision. (My own institution, however, though we enroll a large number of Dreamers, has yet to make any public statement, much to our disgrace.) I was moved to read of the thirty-one Harvard faculty who were arrested yesterday during a public demonstration. That included Walter Johnson, a noted historian of slavery, as well as Jonathan Walton, a religious studies scholar and minister for Harvard’s Memorial Church. Walton, draped in his ecclesiastical robes,  spoke to the gathered assembly before they blocked Massachusetts Avenue in a display of protest. “We are here to say to the U.S. President, to his Attorney General, and to all the insecure leaders of this nation, that no human being is illegal,” he declared.

A few things stood out to me about this scene.

First, a word on region, nation, and moral tradition. Given the rhetoric displayed, principles involved, and geographic location, I couldn’t help but be taken back to the 1850s. It was during that decade that thousands in Massachusetts protested the Fugitive Slave Law that had allowed the federal government to supersede state laws concerning the kidnapping and forced removal of African Americans suspected of fleeing the South. Among those at the forefront of the fight were ministers, like Theodore Parker, who denounced the “sins” of the nation for allowing the plague of slavery to spread across the North through the fugitive policies. Like Walton, Parker emphasized that the laws trampled upon the natural rights of human beings.

The physical space of both protests, in the 1850s and 2010s, was significant. They were both within a stone’s throw of Boston’s revolutionary heritage. The spread of oppressive regimes as far north as New England symbolized the reach and power of evil regimes. It also highlighted what many argued to be a betrayal of a regional heritage. Boston was supposed to be a beacon of liberty. “There was a Boston once,” Parker mused in 1854, but “now there is a North suburb to the city of Alexandria.” This dilemma of small and progressive geographic pockets rebelling against a conservative government has led several historians to pointing to the connections between 2017’s debates over sanctuary cities and the 1850s’ debates over the fugitive slave law, but it also highlights the liminality of discourse over states’ rights and federal power. America’s democratic tradition is full of ironies.

Second, I’m curious if the religious rhetoric of natural rights will gain any capital in today’s political arena, particularly from the left. I’ve mused before on religion and the limits of the liberal imagination, but that dilemma seems all the more urgent after Trump’s election. There was something about seeing Walton wearing both handcuffs and ministerial garb that made me proud of America’s proud tradition of protest prophecy, and hopeful that we might see a resurgence. I’d love to see modern activists resurrect the religious rhetoric of higher laws from anti-slavery proponents like William Loyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. America’s religious identity could certainly use it, especially after the mud it’s been pulled through in recent years. There are tools, there, I believe, that can add fervency to our message and find common ground with more agitators.

And finally, it was impossible to see images from that moving scene near Harvard without thinking of another famous Massachusetts author, Henry David Thoreau, and his powerful essay, “Civil Disobedience.” (Of which I recently mused here.) The belief that, when civil laws trespassed upon moral laws, the conscious actor is forced to cast allegiance, seemed especially relevant. As thirty-one professors were taken away by the Cambridge police, jailed for protesting a law meant to punish the already oppressed, this line immediately came to mind: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” Amen.

National laws are meant to reflect the ideals, priorities, and values of its citizens. It was a modern development that governments are supposed to embody the character of the governed. Confronting this dissonance in an age of legalized xenophobia, rampant racism, and virulent oppression should also involve recognizing the historical periods that echo our own, as well as the cultural traditions that made this possible in the first place.

Sometimes the best thing a book can do is make you feel guilty. That is certainly the case with the book I’m gisting today.

There were more enslaved women in the colonial port town of Bridgetown, found on the western edge of Barbados, than any other demographic group. So why do they receive such little attention? Marisa J. Fuentes, in her provocative book Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (UPenn Press, 2016), argues that the traditional archive was constructed in such a way to inflict perpetual violence upon women. Until that narrative is disrupted, historians continue to partake in this original sin. Fuentes’s book is, she explains, an attempt at “redress” (12). Dispossessed Lives follows the stories of a handful of women in the eighteenth century through the lens of documents that only peripherally mention them: a runaway named Jane, a mulatto brothel, an enslaved woman who was executed for poisoning, and the debates over abolition. These are all poignant stories in their own right, but they become even more powerful when strung together in a narrative of violence and erasure.

It would be difficult to determine the scope of the book by looking at its cover. The title gives no reference to time or place, and the image is an abstract—yet powerful—hint toward sketching humanity. Someone glancing at it in a bookstore without looking at the back cover or inside leaf would not know that it is about eighteenth century Barbados. This, I think, is indicative of the book’s larger aims: Fuentes merely uses these Bridgetown stories to meditate on the archive and historical craft writ large. Though Dispossessed Lives makes important points regarding enslaved life in colonial Bridgetown—indeed, given the preponderance of scholarly work on Caribbean plantations, I really enjoyed the focus on slavery in an urban community—it is really focused on making historians of all geographies and chronologies consider how we consider our methodology.

Rather than highlight Dispossessed Lives‘s major historiographical interjection, it might be easier to just state what standard methods the book doesn’t touch on. It directly engages literature on slavery, violence, gender, urbanity, and class. Perhaps most insightful to me was its discussion on agency, a topic that has received a lot of attention in the most recent generation of work. But rather than do injustice to all these different ideas, I want to just focus on her work with the archive. How are historical records created in the first place, and how do they still shape our scholarship today? The written records regarding enslaved persons, Fuentes argues, were birthed in the context of, and in the purpose for, oppression and violence. They were acts of validation for those found in positions of privilege and violence toward those on the margins. To reconstruct the lives of enslaved and freed persons merely through their own records misses the chance to subvert the archival record. Fuentes, as a result, reads official—white—sources against the grain in an effort to understand the context of their creation. This is more than just recreating a picture through the negative, but rather dissecting the nature of the photograph in the first place.

I must admit that one of the most prevalent feelings I got from reading the book was one of indictment. I felt guilty for not better appropriating these types of tools in my forthcoming book on nationalism in the early republic. Indeed, though I have a whole chapter on slavery which features a number of black voices, I succumb to the methodological sin Fuentes rightly points out by assuming that the only sources about African and African American voices are those directly from African and African Americans. (To say nothing of my failure to reconstruct the role of women in my narrative—but that’s a whole other issue.) Reconstructing the lives, realities, and ideas of those only found on the margins is a crucial historical craft that requires care, skill, and dedication. Dispossessed Lives makes me want to do better in my future work.

To me, the highest compliment I can give a book is to say that I can’t wait to assign it in the classroom. In some ways, I’m not sure how Dispossessed Lives would work with my students: it’s heavily theoretical and methodologically deep. I worry that some of my undergraduates would sink instead of swim. But I do think its topic is so important, and its methodology so powerful, that I want to find ways to fit it in. (Besides emphasizing some of its lessons through my lectures, anyway.) I plan on assigning individual chapters—likely chapters 2 or 3, because what student doesn’t want to learn about a brothel?—the next time I teach a historical methods class. Not only does it introduce readers to the urban politics of slavery and the role(s) of women within the cursed institution, but it will also open up their eyes to the possibilities of history.

Better to let Fuentes teach students while they’re young so they won’t grow up and feel as guilty as I do.