Jane Manning James
Jane Elizabeth Manning James was one of at least twenty children born to a free African American couple in Connecticut at a time when most Black people in the United States were slaves.1 As a young adult, she joined the New Canaan Congregational Church in 1841, but 18 months later, in the winter of 1842–43, she and several family members were baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Jane and others in her family soon desired to join the Saints in Nauvoo, so they traveled from Connecticut to New York, planning to travel on both steamboats and canal boats. However, they were denied boat passage because of their race, so they had to walk the remaining 800 miles. In Peoria, Illinois, local authorities questioned the Mannings as potential fugitive slaves and demanded paperwork to prove their free status. Racism was an obstacle Jane would confront the rest of her life.
Once in Nauvoo, Jane quickly developed a friendship with Joseph and Emma Smith. She lived with them and worked in their household. At one point, Emma invited Jane to be adopted as a child into the Smith family by a priesthood sealing.2 Jane declined, misunderstanding the unfamiliar, new practice, but she firmly believed in Joseph’s prophetic role. “I did know the Prophet Joseph,” she later testified. “He was the finest man I ever saw on earth. … I was certain he was a prophet because I knew it.”3
Through conversations with Joseph and with his mother, Lucy Mack Smith, Jane learned more about the Book of Mormon and its translation and gained an understanding of and a respect for temple ordinances.
Jane married Isaac James, a free Black convert from New Jersey. They, along with Jane’s son Sylvester, left Nauvoo in 1846 to head west with the Saints. In June of that year, Jane and Isaac’s son Silas was born. The next year the family crossed the plains, arriving in the Salt Lake Valley in the fall of 1847. Isaac and Jane had six additional children, only two of whom outlived Jane. As with other early settlers to the Salt Lake Valley, Jane and Isaac worked hard to provide for their family. Isaac worked as a laborer and an occasional coachman for Brigham Young, and Jane spun cloth, made clothing, and did laundry, as she had done in Nauvoo.
Marital tension led Isaac and Jane to divorce in 1870. Jane later had a brief, two-year marriage to a former slave, Frank Perkins, but soon resumed life as a single parent and grandparent. Financial need and the deaths of three children caused Jane to return to work. She made and sold soap, while two of her sons hired out as laborers. In 1890, after 20 years of being away, Isaac returned to Salt Lake City, renewed his Church membership, and formed an amicable relationship with Jane. When he died one year later, the funeral service was held in her home.
Throughout the difficulties of her life, Jane remained committed to her faith in gospel teachings and valued her membership in the Church. She donated to temple construction and participated in the Relief Society and the Young Ladies’ Retrenchment Society.4 Jane richly experienced the gifts of the Spirit, including visions, dreams, healing by faith, and speaking in tongues. “My faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” she wrote later in her life, “is as strong today, nay, it is if possible stronger than it was the day I was first baptized.”5
Between 1884 and 1904, Jane periodically contacted Church leaders—John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, Zina D. H. Young, and Joseph F. Smith—and sought permission to receive her temple endowment and to be sealed.6 At that time, Black Latter-day Saint men and women were not allowed to participate in most temple ordinances. In 1888, stake president Angus M. Cannon authorized Jane to perform baptisms for her deceased kindred.7 Church leaders eventually allowed her to be sealed by proxy into the Joseph Smith family as a servant in 1894, a unique occurrence. Although she did not receive the temple endowment or family sealings during her lifetime, these ordinances were performed in her behalf in 1979.8
She died April 16, 1908, at the age of 85, always a faithful Latter-day Saint. The reported, “Few persons were more noted for faith and faithfulness than was Jane Manning James, and though of the humble earth she numbered friends and acquaintances by the hundreds.”9
Early life in Connecticut
Jane Elizabeth Manning was born in Wilton, Connecticut, to Isaac Manning and Eliza Phyllis Mead. Although late in Jane's life her brother Isaac stated that she had been born in 1813, there are source discrepancies that place her birthday anywhere from September 22, 1812, to the year 1820 or 1822. The Mannings were a free family living in rural Connecticut, and according to her brother Isaac, Jane and he had six siblings: Israel, Peter, Sarah, Angeline, and two more sisters. At the age of six, Jane was sent to New Canaan, Connecticut, to live with Joseph and Hannah Fitch, a wealthy white family. She was raised by the Fitches' daughter and lived with them for the next twenty years. Little is known about Jane's life with the Fitches other than she worked as a servant: cooking, cleaning, and ironing, etc. While with the Fitches, Jane was also brought up as a Christian, and she was baptized into the Presbyterian Church at about 14 years old. On March 1, 1838, Jane gave birth to a son, Sylvester, whose father is unknown.Conversion and relocation to Nauvoo
In the fall of 1842, two LDS missionaries, one of whom was Charles Wesley Wandell, were preaching in the area. Jane was forbidden by her Presbyterian preacher to listen to the missionaries, but recorded later that she "had a desire to hear them. I went on a Sunday and was fully convinced that it was the true Gospel." Jane was baptized into the Latter Day Saint Church the following Sunday, and acquainted many friends and family members with her new beliefs as well. A year later, Jane and eight other members of her family—her mother, three brothers, two sisters, and a brother and sister-in-law—decided to sell their home in Wilton and move to Nauvoo, Illinois, in order to live among other members of their new faith. The James family began their journey with other recently converted Latter Day Saints under the direction of Charles Wandell, and traveled from Fairfield, Connecticut, to New York City, then on to Albany and Buffalo. In Buffalo, the James family was separated from the rest of the group; there is dispute as to whether the split took place because James and her family could not afford to pay the fare from Buffalo to Ohio, or if the black Saints were denied passage due to their race. Wandell made arrangements to transport their luggage while James and her family traveled the remainder of their journey on foot, arriving in Nauvoo in late fall of 1843. James later recalled that the group "walked until our shoes were worn out, and our feet became sore and cracked open and bled until you could see the whole print of our feet with blood on the ground."Living with the Smith family
When James and her family arrived in Nauvoo, they were welcomed by Joseph Smith himself. Over the next year, her mother and siblings established their own homes nearby, while James continued to live with the Smith family and worked as a domestic servant in the Mansion House until Smith's assassination in 1844.James recorded that Emma or Lucy would often stop her and talk with her as she went about doing the washing and cleaning in the house. On one occasion, James was in Joseph's mother Lucy's room and was allowed to handle the Urim and Thummim, the tools used by Joseph Smith to translate the Book of Mormon. Lucy then said to her, "You will live long after I am dead and gone and you can tell the Latter Day Saints that you was permitted to handle the Urim and Thummim".
On another occasion, Emma asked James if she would like to be adopted by and sealed to her and Joseph in the Nauvoo Temple as their spiritual child. James said nothing at the time, and Emma encouraged her to think about it. Emma asked James again two weeks later, at which time she said "no ma'am". James would say later that she did not understand what the question meant at the time, or she would have taken the couple up on their offer.
After Joseph Smith's assassination in 1844, James resided in the home of Brigham Young. It was there where she met and married her husband, Isaac James, a fellow employee of the Young family. Isaac was born a free man and grew up in rural New Jersey; at the time of his baptism he was 19 years old, and was one of the earliest immigrants to Nauvoo.
Journey west and life in Utah
When the Latter Day Saints began to migrate west in 1846, James prepared to move as well. Although many of her immediate family members had joined the church, James and her husband were the only ones who chose to move West with the main body of church members from Nauvoo. At the time of the family's departure, James was pregnant with a second son, Silas James, who was born in Iowa in June 1846. James, with her husband Isaac and oldest son Sylvester, were part of the original group of Latter Day Saints to spend the winter of 1846–1847 at Winter Quarters, Nebraska. They were also part of the first Mormon pioneer company to enter the Salt Lake Valley in September 1847. At the time of their settlement in the Salt Lake Valley, the James family made up a third of the black population in Utah, and were the only ones who were free.The James family lived just north of Temple Square in Salt Lake City on a lot owned by Brigham Young, who employed both Isaac and Jane through the mid-1850s. In May 1848 James gave birth to her daughter Mary Ann—the first black child born in Utah. The family's first years in the valley were difficult: they lived in poverty and often lacked the bare essentials for survival. Despite hardships, James displayed a commitment to serve and help others. In 1849, James' neighbor Eliza Partridge Lyman had sent her husband Amasa on a mission to California and was left with no food to sustain her and her children until the harvest. Lyman records that "Jane James, the colored woman, let me have two pounds of flour, it being half of what she had."
By the mid 1860s the family were able to build a comfortable home in the southwest corner of Salt Lake City and had acquired both farmland and animals, including an ox, horses, and a small flock of sheep. By the end of 1865 the family, while not wealthy, were fairly prosperous. The family was growing quickly as well, and between 1848 and 1860 five children were born: Miriam, Ellen Madora, Jessie Jeroboam, Isaac, and Vilate. James's oldest son Sylvester was listed as a member of the Nauvoo Legion in Utah in 1861.
Jane and her husband Isaac divorced in 1870, and upon Isaac's departure from Utah shortly after, Jane was given custody of their children and of most of the couple's property and assets. Within four years of the divorce James was married to her son Sylvester's father-in-law, widower Frank Perkins. Perkins and his first wife Esther had originally been brought to Utah as slaves by Reuben Perkins, an early Mormon settler, and his family. James' relationship with Perkins lasted less than two years, the couple divorced in 1876, after which time she reverted to her former married name. Throughout the next few decades, James struggled to care for the remaining children at home as a single parent. She sold the family farm in 1872 and moved closer to the city in order to save money. During these years James both managed a household of children and small grandchildren, and also worked as a domestic servant in order to make ends meet. In addition, she made the family's soap, clothing, and raised vegetables in a small garden. Half of her children had predeceased her by 1875, and two of her grandchildren had died as well. After a twenty-year absence, James' first husband Isaac returned to Utah very ill, and lived with Jane until his death in 1891, and though the two never remarried his funeral was held at her home.
James remained active in the church, and participated extensively in the Relief Society and other church-affiliated women's organizations. In 1893, James completed her autobiography with the help of fellow church member Elizabeth Roundy. She also contributed financially to the building of the Logan, Manti, and St. George temples. In her later life, both she and her brother Isaac J. Manning received reserved seats near the front and center of the Salt Lake Tabernacle for church services. James remained a strong supporter of Joseph Smith throughout her life, calling him "the finest man I ever saw on earth."
Jane Elizabeth Manning James died April 16, 1908, in Salt Lake City. Church President Joseph F. Smith spoke at her funeral, where he declared that she would receive all her temple blessings in the eternities and become a "white and beautiful person," reflecting the theology of the Church on race at the time. According to The Deseret News, her funeral was attended by many.