Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1913. / "Reprinted from the Publications of the Mississippi historical society, volume xiv, 1913." Bibliography: p. 228-229. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1913. / "Reprinted from the Publications of the Mississippi historical society, volume xiv, 1913." Bibliography: p. 228-229.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1966. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

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Between 1830 and 1844, the Mormons slightly shifted their position on African-American slavery, but maintained the middle ground on the issue overall. When Mormons began gathering to Utah in 1847, Southern converts brought their black slaves with them to the Great Basin. In 1852 the first Utah Territorial legislature passed “An Act in Relation to Service" that legalized slavery in Utah. This action was prompted primarily by the need to regulate slavery and contextualize its practice within the Mormon belief system. Ironically, had Congress known of Utah's slave population, it may have never granted Utah the power to legislate on slavery. During the debates over the Compromise of 1850, which series of acts created Utah Territory without restriction on slavery, Utah lobbyist John M. Bernhisel hid Utah slavery from members of Congress. Several years later, when Utah's laws were under review by Congressional committees, the public announcement of polygamy overshadowed information that betrayed slavery's practice in Utah. The fact that slavery's practice in Utah was never widely known, especially by members of Congress, delayed for nearly four years the final sectional crisis that would culminate in civil war. Utah may have been a peculiar place for the “peculiar institution" of slavery, but its legalization in the territory, and Congress' failure to acknowledge it, provide a compelling case study of popular sovereignty in action in the antebellum West.

The work examines the antislavery writings of Francis Wayland (1796-1865). Wayland pastored churches in Boston and Providence, but he left his indelible mark as the fourth and twenty-eight year president of Brown University (1827-1855). The author of numerous works on moral science, economics, philosophy, education, and the Baptist denomination, his administration marked a transitional stage in the emergence of American colleges from a classically oriented curriculum to an educational philosophy based on science and modern languages. Wayland left an enduring legacy at Brown, but it was his antislavery writings that brought him the most notoriety and controversy. Developed throughout his writings, rather than systematically in a major work, his antislavery views were shaped and tested in the political and intellectual climate of the antebellum world in which he lived. First developed in The Elements of Moral Science (1835), he tested the boundaries of activism in The Limitations of Human Responsibility (1838), and publicly debated antislavery in Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (1845). The political crisis from the Mexican-American War through the Kansas-Nebraska Act heightened Wayland’s activism as delineated in The Duty of Obedience to the Civil Magistrate (1847), his noncompliance with the Fugitive Slave Law, and his public address on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854). In 1861 he became a committed Unionist. I argue that Francis Wayland was a mediating figure in the controversy between abolitionists and proslavery apologists and that his life was a microcosm of the transition that many individuals made from moderate antislavery to abolitionism. Wayland proved unique in that he was heavily coveted by Northern abolitionists who sought his unconditional support and yet he was respected by Southerners who appreciated his uncondemning attitude toward slaveholders even while he opposed slavery. I argue that Wayland’s transition from reluctant critic to public activist was not solely due to the political sweep of events, but that his latter activism was already marked in his earlier work. Most importantly, his life demonstrated both the limits and possibilities in the history of American antislavery.