Mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has
been full of stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely
to remain so to the end. Its adherents have been hunted and
hounded from one end of the country to the other, and the result
is that for years they have hated all “Gentiles” indiscriminately
and with all their might. Joseph Smith, the finder of the Book of
Mormon and founder of the religion, was driven from State to
State with his mysterious copperplates and the miraculous stones
he read their inscriptions with. Finally he instituted his
“church” in Ohio and Brigham Young joined it. The neighbors began
to persecute, and apostasy commenced. Brigham held to the faith
and worked hard. He arrested desertion. He did more—he added
converts in the midst of the trouble. He rose in favor and
importance with the brethren. He was made one of the Twelve
Apostles of the Church. He shortly fought his way to a higher
post and a more powerful—President of the Twelve. The neighbors
rose up and drove the Mormons out of Ohio, and they settled in
Missouri. Brigham went with them. The Missourians drove them out
and they retreated to Nauvoo, Illinois. They prospered there, and
built a temple which made some pretensions to architectural grace
and achieved some celebrity in a section of country where a brick
court-house with a tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated
with reverential awe. But the Mormons were badgered and harried
again by their neighbors. All the proclamations Joseph Smith
could issue denouncing polygamy and repudiating it as utterly
anti-Mormon were of no avail; the people of the neighborhood, on
both sides of the Mississippi, claimed that polygamy was
practised by the Mormons, and not only polygamy but a little of
everything that was bad. Brigham returned from a mission to
England, where he had established a Mormon newspaper, and he
brought back with him several hundred converts to his preaching.
His influence among the brethren augmented with every move he
made. Finally Nauvoo was invaded by the Missouri and Illinois
Gentiles, and Joseph Smith killed. A Mormon named Rigdon assumed
the Presidency of the Mormon church and government, in Smith’s
place, and even tried his hand at a prophecy or two. But a
greater than he was at hand. Brigham seized the advantage of the
hour and without other authority than superior brain and nerve
and will, hurled Rigdon from his high place and occupied it
himself. He did more. He launched an elaborate curse at Rigdon
and his disciples; and he pronounced Rigdon’s “prophecies”
emanations from the devil, and ended by “handing the false
prophet over to the buffetings of Satan for a thousand
years”—probably the longest term ever inflicted in Illinois. The
people recognized their master. They straightway elected Brigham
Young President, by a prodigious majority, and have never
faltered in their devotion to him from that day to this. Brigham
had forecast—a quality which no other prominent Mormon has
probably ever possessed. He recognized that it was better to move
to the wilderness than be moved. By his command the people
gathered together their meagre effects, turned their backs upon
their homes, and their faces toward the wilderness, and on a
bitter night in February filed in sorrowful procession across the
frozen Mississippi, lighted on their way by the glare from their
burning temple, whose sacred furniture their own hands had fired!
They camped, several days afterward, on the western verge of
Iowa, and poverty, want, hunger, cold, sickness, grief and
persecution did their work, and many succumbed and died—martyrs,
fair and true, whatever else they might have been. Two years the
remnant remained there, while Brigham and a small party crossed
the country and founded Great Salt Lake City, purposely choosing
a land which was outside the ownership and jurisdiction of the
hated American nation. Note that. This was in 1847. Brigham moved
his people there and got them settled just in time to see
disaster fall again. For the war closed and Mexico ceded
Brigham’s refuge to the enemy—the United States! In 1849 the
Mormons organized a “free and independent” government and erected
the “State of Deseret,” with Brigham Young as its head. But the
very next year Congress deliberately snubbed it and created the
“Territory of Utah” out of the same accumulation of mountains,
sage-brush, alkali and general desolation,—but made Brigham
Governor of it. Then for years the enormous migration across the
plains to California poured through the land of the Mormons and
yet the church remained staunch and true to its lord and master.
Neither hunger, thirst, poverty, grief, hatred, contempt, nor
persecution could drive the Mormons from their faith or their
allegiance; and even the thirst for gold, which gleaned the
flower of the youth and strength of many nations was not able to
entice them! That was the final test. An experiment that could
survive that was an experiment with some substance to it
somewhere.
Great Salt Lake City throve finely, and so did Utah. One of
the last things which Brigham Young had done before leaving Iowa,
was to appear in the pulpit dressed to personate the worshipped
and lamented prophet Smith, and confer the prophetic succession,
with all its dignities, emoluments and authorities, upon
“President Brigham Young!” The people accepted the pious fraud
with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham’s power was sealed and
secured for all time. Within five years afterward he openly added
polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a
“revelation” which he pretended had been received nine years
before by Joseph Smith, albeit Joseph is amply on record as
denouncing polygamy to the day of his death.
Now was Brigham become a second Andrew Johnson in the small
beginning and steady progress of his official grandeur. He had
served successively as a disciple in the ranks; home missionary;
foreign missionary; editor and publisher; Apostle; President of
the Board of Apostles; President of all Mormondom, civil and
ecclesiastical; successor to the great Joseph by the will of
heaven; “prophet,” “seer,” “revelator.” There was but one dignity
higher which he could aspire to, and he reached out modestly and
took that—he proclaimed himself a God!
He claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter,
and that he will be its God, and his wives and children its
goddesses, princes and princesses. Into it all faithful Mormons
will be admitted, with their families, and will take rank and
consequence according to the number of their wives and children.
If a disciple dies before he has had time to accumulate enough
wives and children to enable him to be respectable in the next
world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children
for him after he is dead, and they are duly credited to his
account and his heavenly status advanced accordingly.
Let it be borne in mind that the majority of the Mormons have
always been ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect,
unacquainted with the world and its ways; and let it be borne in
mind that the wives of these Mormons are necessarily after the
same pattern and their children likely to be fit representatives
of such a conjunction; and then let it be remembered that for
forty years these creatures have been driven, driven, driven,
relentlessly! and mobbed, beaten, and shot down; cursed,
despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert, whither they
journeyed gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the ancient
solitudes with their lamentations and marking the long way with
graves of their dead—and all because they were simply trying to
live and worship God in the way which they believed with all
their hearts and souls to be the true one. Let all these things
be borne in mind, and then it will not be hard to account for the
deathless hatred which the Mormons bear our people and our
government.
That hatred has “fed fat its ancient grudge” ever since Mormon
Utah developed into a self-supporting realm and the church waxed
rich and strong. Brigham as Territorial Governor made it plain
that Mormondom was for the Mormons. The United States tried to
rectify all that by appointing territorial officers from New
England and other anti-Mormon localities, but Brigham prepared to
make their entrance into his dominions difficult. Three thousand
United States troops had to go across the plains and put these
gentlemen in office. And after they were in office they were as
helpless as so many stone images. They made laws which nobody
minded and which could not be executed. The federal judges opened
court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday
spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at—for there was nothing
to try, nothing to do nothing on the dockets! And if a Gentile
brought a suit, the Mormon jury would do just as it pleased about
bringing in a verdict, and when the judgment of the court was
rendered no Mormon cared for it and no officer could execute it.
Our Presidents shipped one cargo of officials after another to
Utah, but the result was always the same—they sat in a blight
for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day by day,
they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its
reward in darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and
warnings of a more and more dismal nature—and at last they
either succumbed and became despised tools and toys of the
Mormons, or got scared and discomforted beyond all endurance and
left the Territory. If a brave officer kept on courageously till
his pluck was proven, some pliant Buchanan or Pierce would remove
him and appoint a stick in his place. In 1857 General Harney came
very near being appointed Governor of Utah. And so it came very
near being Harney governor and Cradlebaugh judge!—two men who
never had any idea of fear further than the sort of murky
comprehension of it which they were enabled to gather from the
dictionary. Simply (if for nothing else) for the variety they
would have made in a rather monotonous history of Federal
servility and helplessness, it is a pity they were not fated to
hold office together in Utah.
Up to the date of our visit to Utah, such had been the
Territorial record. The Territorial government established there
had been a hopeless failure, and Brigham Young was the only real
power in the land. He was an absolute monarch—a monarch who
defied our President—a monarch who laughed at our armies when
they camped about his capital—a monarch who received without
emotion the news that the august Congress of the United States
had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went forth
calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives.
