Enslavement in Territorial Utah Documents Collection
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This collection of transcribed documents represents the most comprehensive primary source compilation of the legislative debates surrounding African American and Indigenous slavery in Utah Territory as well as what African American “servitude” and Native American “indentures” looked like in practice. Pitman shorthand expert LaJean Purcell Carruth transcribed the speeches in the collection into longhand and historians W. Paul Reeve and Christopher Rich gathered the documents together. The collection served as the backbone to Reeve, Rich, and Carruth’s book, This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah (Oxford University Press, 2024) a narrative history of human bondage in nineteenth-century Utah Territory.