By now Joseph’s attitude toward the Negro had become so liberal — partly as a result of his correspondence with the abolitionist C. V. Dyer — that he argued with Orson Hyde that if the roles of Negro and white were reversed the former would quickly assume the characteristics of the latter.f The demagogic Hyde was not impressed, and his conviction that the abolitionists were “trying to make void the curse of God” was never wholly erased from Mormon thinking, particularly since it could be reinforced by the unfortunate anti-Negro sentiments in Joseph’s Book of Abraham.!
