Do not court persecution. We have known Gladden Bishop for more than twenty years, and know him to be a poor, dirty curse . . . . I say again, you Gladdenites, do not court persecution, or you will get more than you want, and it will come quicker than you want it. I say to you Bishops, do not allow them to preach in your wards.” (After telling of a dream he had had, in which he saw two men creep into the bed where one of his wives was lying, whereupon he took a large bowie knife and cut one of their throats from ear to ear, saying, “Go to hell across lots,” he continued:) “I say, rather than that apostates should flourish here I will unsheath my bowie knife and conquer or die.” (Great commotion in the congregation, and a simultaneous burst of feeling, assenting to the declaration.) “Now, you nasty apostates, clear out, or judgment will be put to the line and righteousness to the plummet.” (Voices generally, “Go it,” “go it.”) “If you say it is all right, raise your hand.” (All hands up.) “Let us call upon the Lord to assist us in this and every good work.” *
*Journal of Discourses, Vol. I, p. 82.
This was the practical end of Gladdenism.
Young’s dictatorship was quite as broad and determined in things temporal as in things spiritual. He made no concealment of the fact that he was a moneygetter, only insisting on his readiness to contribute to the support of church enterprises. The canons through the mountains which shut in the valley were the source of wood supply for the city, and their control was very valuable. Young brought this matter before the Conference of October 9, 1852, speaking on it at length, and finally putting his own view in the form of a resolution that the canons be placed in the hands of individuals, who should make good roads through them, and obtain their pay by taking toll at the entrance. After getting the usual unanimous vote on his proposition, he said: “Let the Judges of the County of Great Salt Lake take due notice and govern themselves accordingly . . . . This is my order for the judges to take due notice of. It does not come from the Governor, but from the President of the church. You will not see any proclamation in the paper to this effect, but it is a mere declaration of the President of the Conference.”* The “declaration,” of course, had all the effect of a law, and Young got one of the best canons.
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. I, pp. 217, 218.
Very early in his rule Young defined his views about the property rights of the Saints. “A man,” he declared in the Tabernacle on June 5, 1853, “has no right with property which, according to the laws of the land, legally belongs to him, if he does not want to use it . . . . When we first came into the valley, the question was asked me if men would ever be allowed to come into this church, and remain in it, and hoard up their property. I say, no.” *
* Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 252-253
Another view of property rights was thus set forth in his discourse of December 5, 1853:–
“If an Elder has borrowed [a hundred or a thousand dollars from you], and you find he is going to apostatize, then you may tighten the screws on him. But if he is willing to preach the Gospel without purse or scrip, it is none of your business what he does with the money he has borrowed from you.” *
* Ibid, Vol. I, p. 340.
Addressing the people in the trying business year of 1856, when his own creditors were pushing him hard, Young said:
“I wish to give you one text to preach upon, ‘From this time henceforth do not fret thy gizzard.’ I will pay you when I can and not before. Now I hope you will apostatize if you would rather do it.”*
* Ibid., Vol. III, p. 4.
Kimball, in giving Young’s order to some seventy men, who had displeased him, to leave the territory, used these words: “When a man is appointed to take a mission, unless he has a just and honorable reason for not going, if he does not go he will be severed from the church. Why? Because you said you were willing to be passive, and, if you are not passive, that lump of clay must be cut off from the church and laid aside, and a lump put on that will be passive.” *
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. III, p. 242.
With this testimony of men inside the church may be placed that of Captain Howard Stansbury, of the United Stated Topographical Engineers, who arrived in the valley in August, 1849, under instructions from the government to make a survey of the lakes of that region. The Mormons thought that it was the intention of the government to divide the land into townships and sections, and to ignore their claim to title by occupation. In his official report, after mentioning his haste to disabuse Young’s mind on this point, Captain Stansbury says, “I was induced to pursue this conciliatory course, not only in justice to the government, but also because I knew, from the peculiar organization of this singular community, that, unless the ‘President’ was fully satisfied that no evil was intended to his people, it would be useless for me to attempt to carry out my instructions.” The choice between abject conciliation or open conflict was that which Brigham Young extended to nearly every federal officer who entered Utah during his reign.
The Mormons of Utah started in to assert their independence of the government of the United States in every way. The rejection of the constitution of Deseret by Congress did not hinder the elected legislature from meeting and passing laws. The ninth chapter of the “ordinances,” as they were called, passed by this legislature (on January 19, 1851) was a charter for Great Salt Lake City. This charter provided for the election of a mayor, four aldermen, nine councillors, and three judges, the first judges to be chosen viva voce, and their successors by the City Council. The appointment of eleven subordinate officers was placed in the Council’s hands. The mayor and aldermen were to be the justices of the peace, with a right of appeal to the municipal court, consisting of the same persons sitting together, and from that to the probate court. The first mayor, aldermen, and councillors were appointed by the governor of the State of Deseret. Similar charters were provided for Ogden, Provo City, and other settlements.
As soon as Salt Lake City was laid off into wards, Young had a Bishop placed over each of these, and, always under his direction, these Bishops practically controlled local affairs to the date of the city charter. Each Bishop came to be a magistrate of his ward,* and under them in all the settlements all public work was carried on and all revenue collected. The High Council of ten is defined by Tullidge as “a quorum of judges, in equity for the people, at the head of which is the President of the state.”
* Brigham Young testified in the Tabernacle as to the kind of justice that was meted out in the Bishops’ courts. In his sermon of March 6, 1856, he said: “There are men here by the score who do not know their right hands from their left, so far as the principles of justice are concerned. Does our High Council? No, for they will let men throw dirt in their eyes until you cannot find the one hundred millionth part of an ounce of common sense in them. You may go to the Bishops’ courts, and what are they? A set of old grannies. They cannot judge a case pending between two old women, to say nothing of a case between man and man:’ Journal of Discourses, Vol. III, p. 225.
These men did not hesitate to attempt a currency of their own. On the arrival of the Mormons in the valley, they first made their exchanges through barter. Paper currency was issued in 1849 and some years later. When gold dust from California appeared in 1849, some of it was coined in Salt Lake City by means of homemade dies and crucibles. The denominations were $2.50, $5, $10, and $20. Some of these coins, made without alloy, were stamped with a bee-hive and eagle on one side, and on the reverse with the motto, “Holiness to the Lord” in the so-called Deseret alphabet. This alphabet was invented after their arrival in Salt Lake Valley, to assist in separating the Mormons from the rest of the nation, its preparation having been intrusted to a committee of the board of regents in 1853. It contained thirty-two characters. A primer and two books of the Mormon Bible were printed in the new characters, the legislature in 1855 having voted $2500 to meet the expense; but the alphabet was never practically used, and no attempt is any longer made to remember it. Early in 1849 the High Council voted that the Kirtland bank-bills (of which a supply must have remained unissued) be put out on a par with gold, and in this they saw a fulfilment of the prophet’s declaration that these notes would some day be as good as gold.
Another early ordinance passed by the Deseret legislature incorporated “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” authorizing the appointment of a trustee in trust to hold and manage all the property of the church, which should be free from tax, and giving the church complete authority to make its own regulations, “provided, however, that each and every act or practice so established, or adopted for law or custom, shall relate to solemnities, sacraments, ceremonies, consecrations, endowments, tithing, marriages, fellowship, or the religious duties of man to his Maker, inasmuch as the doctrines, principles, practices, or performances support virtue and increase morality, and are not inconsistent with or repugnant to the constitution of the United States or of this State, and are founded on the revelations of the Lord.” Thus early was the ground taken that the practice of polygamy was a constitutional right. Brigham Young was chosen as the trustee.
The second ordinance passed by this legislature incorporated the University of the State of Deseret, at Salt Lake City, to be governed by a chancellor and twelve regents.
The earliest non-Mormons to experience the effect of that absolute Mormon rule, the consequences of which the Missourians had feared, were the emigrants who passed through Salt Lake Valley on their way to California after the discovery of gold, or on their way to Oregon. The complaints of the Californians were set forth in a little book, written by one of them, Nelson Slater, and printed in Colona, California, in 1851, under the title, “Fruits of Mormonism.” The general complaints were set forth briefly in a petition to Congress containing nearly two hundred and fifty signatures, dated Colona, June 1, 1851, which asked that the territorial government be abrogated, and a military government be established in its place. This petition charged that many emigrants had been murdered by the Mormons when there was a suspicion that they had taken part in the earlier persecutions; that when any members of the Mormon community, becoming dissatisfied, tried to leave, they were pursued and killed; that the Mormons levied a tax of two per cent on the property of emigrants who were compelled to pass a winter among them; that it was nearly impossible for emigrants to obtain justice in the Mormon courts; that the Mormons, high and low, openly expressed treasonable sentiments against the United States government; and that letters of emigrants mailed at Salt Lake City were opened, and in many instances destroyed.
Mr. Slater’s book furnishes the specifications of these general charges.
CHAPTER VII. The “Reformation”
Young soon had occasion to make practical use of the dictatorial power that he had assumed. The character which those members of the flock who had migrated from Missouri and Illinois had established among their neighbors in those states was not changed simply by their removal to a wilderness all by themselves. They had no longer the old excuse that their misdeeds were reprisals on persecuting enemies, but this did not save them from the temptation to exercise their natural propensities. Again we shall take only the highest Mormon testimony on this subject.
One of the first sins for which Young openly reproved his congregation was profane swearing. He brought this matter pointedly to their attention in an address to the Conference of October 9, 1852, when he said: “You Elders of Israel will go into the canons, and curse and swear–damn and curse your oxen, and swear by Him who created you. I am telling the truth. Yes, you rip and curse and swear as bad as any pirates ever did.”*
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. I, p. 211.
Possibly the church authorities could have overlooked the swearing, but a matter which gave them more distress was the insecurity of property. This became so great an annoyance that Young spoke out plainly on the subject, and he did not attempt to place the responsibility outside of his own people. A few citations will illustrate this.
In an address in the Tabernacle on June 5, 1853, noticing complaints about the stealing and rebranding of cattle, he said: “I will propose a plan to stop the stealing of cattle in coming time, and it is this–let those who have cattle on hand join in a company, and fence in about fifty thousand acres of land, and so keep on fencing until all the vacant land is substantially enclosed. Some persons will perhaps say, ‘I do not know how good or how high a fence it will be necessary to build to keep thieves out.’ I do not know either, except you build one that will keep out the devil.”* On another occasion, with a personal grievance to air, he said in the Tabernacle: “I have gone to work and made roads to get wood, and have not been able to get it. I have cut it down and piled it up, and still have not got it. I wonder if anybody else can say so. Have any of you piled up your wood, and, when you have gone back, could not find it? Some stories could be told of this kind that would make professional thieves ashamed.”**
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. I, p. 252.
** Ibid., Vol. I, p. 213.
Young made no concealment of the fact that men high in the councils of the church were among the peculators. In his discourse of June 15, 1856, he said: “I have proof ready to show that Bishops have taken in thousands of pounds in weight of tithing which they have never reported to the General Tithing Office. We have documents to show that Bishops have taken in hundreds of bushels of wheat, and only a small portion of it has come into the General Tithing Office. They stole it to let their friends speculate upon.”*
* Ibid., Vol. III, p. 342.
The new-comers from Europe also received his attention. Referring to unkept promises of speedy repayment by assisted immigrants of advances made to them, Young said, in 1855: “And what will they do when they get here? Steal our wagons, and go off with them to Canada, and try to steal the bake-kettles, fryingpans, tents, and wagon-covers; and will borrow the oxen and run away with them, if you do not watch them closely. Do they all do this? No, but many of them will try to do it.”* And again, a month later: “What previous characters some of you had in Wales, in England, in Scotland, and perhaps in Ireland. Do not be scared if it is proven against some one in the Bishop’s court that you did steal the poles from your neighbor’s garden fence. If it is proven that you have been to some person’s wood pile and stolen wood, don’t be frightened, for if you will steal it must be made manifest.” ** J. M. Grant was quite as plain spoken. In an address in the bowery in Salt Lake City in September, 1856, he declared that “you can scarcely find a place in this city that is not full of filth and abominations.”***
* Ibid., Vol. III, p. 3.
** Ibid., Vol. III, p. 49.
*** Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 51.
Young’s denunciations were not quietly accepted, but protests and threats were alike wasted upon him. Referring to complaints of some of the flock that his denunciation was more than they could bear, he replied, “But you have got to bear it, and, if you will not, make up your minds to go to hell at once and have done with it.” * On another occasion he said, “You need, figuratively, to have it rain pitchforks, tines downward, from this pulpit, Sunday after Sunday.” On another occasion, alluding to letters he had received, warning him against attacking men’s characters, he said, “When such epistles come to me, I feel like saying, I ask no advice of you nor of all your clan this side of hell.”**
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. III, p. 49.
** Ibid, p. 50.
When mere denunciation did not reform his followers, Young became still plainer in his language, and began to explain to them the latitude which the church proposed to take in applying punishment. In a remarkable sermon on October 6, 1855, on the “stealing, lying, deceiving, wickedness, and covetousness” of the elders in Israel, he spoke as follows:–
“Live on here, then, you poor miserable curses, until the time of retribution, when your heads will have to be severed from your bodies. Just let the Lord Almighty say, Lay judgment to the line and righteousness to the plummet,* and the time of thieves is short in this community. What do you suppose they would say in old Massachusetts should they hear that the Latter-day Saints had received a revelation or commandment to ‘lay judgment to the line and righteousness to the plummet’? What would they say in old Connecticut? They would raise a universal howl of, ‘How wicked the Mormons are. They are killing the evil doers who are among them. Why, I hear that they kill the wicked away up yonder in Utah.’ . . . What do I care for the wrath of man? No more than I do for the chickens that run in my door yard. I am here to teach the ways of the Lord, and lead men to life everlasting; but if they have not a mind to go there, I wish them to keep out of my path.”**
* These words, from Isaiah xxviii. 17, are constantly used by Young to denote the extreme punishment which the church might inflict on any offender.
** Journal of Discourses, Vol. III, p. 50.
From this time Young and his closest associates seemed to make no concealment of their intention to take the lives of any persons whom they considered offenders. One or two more citations from his discourses may be made to sustain this statement. On February 24, 1856, he declared, “I am not afraid of all hell, nor of all the world, in laying judgment to the line when the Lord says so.”* In the following month he told his congregation: “The time is coming when justice will be laid to the line and righteousness to the plummet; when we shall take the old broadsword and ask, Are you for God? And if you are not heartily on the Lord’s side, you will be hewn down.”** Heber C. Kimball was equally plain spoken. A year earlier he had said in the Tabernacle: “If a man rebels, I will tell him of it, and if he resents a timely warning, HE IS UNWISE . . . . I have never yet shed man’s blood, and I pray to God that I never may, unless it is actually necessary.”*** Sultans and doges have freely used assassination as a weapon, but it seems to have remained for the Mormon church under Brigham Young to declare openly its intention to make whatever it might call church apostasy subject to capital punishment.
*Journal of Discourses, Vol. III, p. 241.
** Ibid., p. 266.
*** Ibid., pp, 163-164.
Out of the lawless condition of the Mormon flock, as we have thus seen it pictured, and out of this radical view of the proper punishment of offenders, resulted, in 1856, that remarkable movement still known in Mormondon as “The Reformation “–a movement that has been characterized by one writer as “a reign of lust and fanatical fury unequalled since the Dark Ages,” and by another as “a fanaticism at once blind, dangerous, and terrible.” During its continuance the religious zealot, the amorous priest, the jealous lover, the man covetous of worldly goods, and the framers of the church policy, from acknowledged Apostle to secret Danite, all had their own way. ” Were I counsel for a Mormon on trial for a crime committed at the time under consideration, I should plead wholesale insanity,” said J. H. Beadle. It was during this period that that system was perfected under which the life of no man,–or company of men,–against whom the wrath of the church was directed, was of any value; no household was safe from the lust of any aged elder; no person once in the valley could leave it alive against the church’s consent.
The active agent in starting “The Reformation” was the inventor of “blood atonement,” Jedediah M. Grant.* That his censure of a Bishop and his counsellors at Kayesville was the actual origin of the movement, as has been stated,** cannot be accepted as proven, in view of the preparation made for the era of blood, as indicated in the church discourses. Lieutenant Gunnison, for whom the Mormons in later years always asserted their friendship, writing concerning his observations as early as 1852, said:–
* A correspondent of the. New York Times at this date described Grant as “a tall, thin, repulsive-looking man, of acute, vigorous intellect, a thorough-paced scoundrel, and the most essential blackguard in the pulpit. He was sometimes called Brigham’s sledge hammer.”
** “Rocky Mountain Saints,” p. 293.
“Witnesses are seldom put on oath in the lower courts, and there is nothing known of the ‘law’s delay,’ and the quibbles whereby the ends of truth and justice may be defeated. But they have a criminal code called ‘The Laws of the Lord,’ which has been given by revelation and not promulgated, the people not being able quite to bear it, or the organization still too imperfect. It is to be put in force, however, before long, and when in vogue, all grave crimes will be punished and atoned for by cutting off the head of the offender. This regulation arises from the fact that without shedding of blood there is no remission.”*
* “History of the Mormons,” Book 1, Chapter X.
Gunnison’s statement furnishes indisputable proof that this legal system was so generally talked of some four years before it was put in force that it came to the ears of a non-Mormon temporary resident.
After the condemnation of the Kayesville offenders and their rebaptism, the next move was the appointment of missionaries to hold services in every ward, and the sending out of what were really confessors, appointed for every block, to inquire of all–young and old–concerning the most intimate details of their lives. The printed catechism given to these confessors was so indelicate that it was suppressed in later years. These prying inquisitors found opportunity to gain information for their superiors about any persons suspected of disloyalty, and one use they made of their visitations was to urge the younger sisters to be married to the older men, as a readier means of salvation than union with men of their own age. That there was opposition to this espionage is shown by some remarks of H. C. Kimball in the Tabernacle, in March, 1856, when he said: “I have heard some individuals saying that, if the Bishops came into their houses and opened their cupboards, they would split their heads open. THAT WOULD NOT BE A WISE OR SAFE OPERATION.” *
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. III, p. 271.
Some of the information secured by the church confessional was embarrassing to the leaders. At a meeting of male members in Social Hall, Young, Grant, and others denounced the sinners in scathing terms, Young ending his remarks by saying, “All you who have been guilty of committing adultery, stand up.” At once more than three-quarters of those present arose.* For such confessors a way of repentance was provided through rebaptism, but the secretly accused had no such avenue opened to them.
* “A leading Bishop in Salt Lake City stated to the author that Brigham was as much appalled at this sight as was Macbeth when he beheld the woods of Birnam marching on to Dunsinane. A Bishop arose and asked if there were not some misunderstanding among the brethren concerning the question. He thought that perhaps the elders understood Brigham’s inquiry to apply to their conduct before they had thrown off the works of the devil and embraced Mormonism; but upon Brigham reiterating that it was the adultery committed since they had entered the church, the brethren to a man still stood up:”–“Rocky Mountain Saints,” p. 296.
One of the first victims of the reformers was H. J. Jarvis, a reputable merchant of Salt Lake City. He was dragged over his counter one evening and thrown into the street by men who then robbed his store and defiled his household goods, giving him as the cause of the visitation the explanation that he had spoken evil of the authorities, and had invited Gentiles to supper. His two wives could not secure even a hearing from Young in his behalf.* This, however, was a minor incident.
* “Rocky Mountain Saints;” p. 297.
That Young’s rule should be objected to by some members of the church was inevitable. There were men in the valley at that early day who would rebel against such a dictatorship under any name; others–men of means–who were alarmed by the declarations about property rights, and others to whom the announcement concerning polygamy was repugnant. When such persons gave expression to their discontent, they angered the church officers; when they indicated their purpose to leave the valley, they alarmed them. Anything like an exodus of the flock would have broken up all of Young’s plans, and have undone the scheme of immigration that had cost so much time and money. Accordingly, when this movement for “reform” began, the church let it be known that any desertion of the flock would be considered the worst form of apostasy, and that the deserter must take the consequences. To quote Brigham Young’s own words: “The moment a person decides to leave this people, he is cut off from every object that is desirable for time and eternity. Every possession and object of affection will be taken from those who forsake the truth, and their identity and existence will eventually cease.”*
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. IV, p. 31.
The almost unbreakable hedge that surrounded the inhabitants of the valley at this time, under the system of church espionage, has formed a subject for the novelist, and has seemed to many persons, as described, a probable exaggeration. But, while Young did not narrate in his pulpit the tales of blood which his instructions gave rise to, there is testimony concerning them which leaves no reasonable doubt of their truthfulness.
CHAPTER VIII. SOME CHURCH-INSPIRED MURDERS
The murders committed during the “Reformation” which attracted most attention, both because of the parties concerned, the effort made by a United States judge to convict the guilty, and the confessions of the latter subsequently obtained, have been known as the Parrish, or Springville, murders. The facts concerning them may be stated fairly as follows:–
William R. Parrish was one of the most outspoken champions of the Twelve when the controversy with Rigdon occurred at Nauvoo after Smith’s death, and he accompanied the fugitives to Salt Lake Valley. One evening, early in March, 1857, a Bishop named Johnson (husband of ten wives), with two companions, called at Parrish’s house in Springville, and put to him some of the questions which the inquisitors of the day were wont to ask–if he prayed, something about his future plans, etc. It had been rumored that Parrish’s devotion to the church had cooled, and that he was planning to move with his family–a wife and six children–to California; and at a meeting in Bishop Johnson’s council house a letter had been read from Brigham Young directing them to ascertain the intention of certain “suspicious characters in the neighborhood,”* and if they should make a break and, being pursued, which he required, he ‘would be sorry to hear a favorable report; but the better way is to lock the stable door before the horse is stolen.’ This letter was over Brigham’s signature.”** This letter was the real cause of the Bishop’s visit to Parrish. At a meeting about a week later, A. Durfee and G. Potter were deputed to find out when the Parrishes proposed to leave the territory. Accordingly, Durfee got employment with Parrish, and both of them gave him the idea that they sympathized with his desire to depart. One morning, about a week later, Parrish discovered that his horses had been stolen, and efforts to recover them were fruitless.
* “There had been public preaching in Springville to the effect that no Apostles would be allowed to leave; if they did, hog- holes in the fences would be stopped up with them. I heard these sermons.”–Affidavit of Mrs. Parrish; appendix to “Speech of Hon. John Cradlebaugh”.
** Confession of J. M. Stewart, one of the Bishop’s counsellors and precinct magistrate.
Meanwhile, Parrish, unsuspicious of Potter and Durfee,* was telling them of his continued plans to escape, how constantly his house was watched, and how difficult it was for him to get out the few articles required for the trip. Finally, at Parrish’s suggestion, it was arranged that he and Durfee should walk out of the village in the daytime, as the method best calculated to allay suspicion.
* Durfee’s confession, appendix to Cradlebaugh’s speech.
They carried out this plan, and when they got to a stream called Dry Creek, Parrish asked Durfee to go back to the house and bring his two sons, Beason and Orrin, to join him. When Durfee returned to the house, at about sunset, he found Potter there, and Potter set off at once for the meeting-place, ostensibly to carry some of the articles needed for the journey.
Potter met Parrish where he was waiting for Durfee’s return, and they walked down a lane to a fence corner, where a Mormon named William Bird was lying, armed with a gun. Here occurred what might be called an illustration of “poetic justice.” In the twilight, Bird mistook his victim, and fired, killing Potter. As Bird rose and stepped forward, Parrish asked if it was he who had fired the unexpected shot. For a reply Bird drew a knife, clenched with Parrish, and, as he afterward expressed it, “worked the best he could in stabbing him.” He “worked” so well that, as afterward described by one of the men concerned in the plot,* the old man was cut all over, fifteen times in the back, as well as in the left side, the arms, and the hands. But Bird knew that his task was not completed, and, as soon as the murder of the elder Parrish was accomplished, taking his own and Potter’s gun, he again concealed himself in the fence corner, awaiting the appearance of the Parrish boys. They soon came up in company with Durfee, and Bird fired at Beason with so good aim that he dropped dead at once. Turning the weapon on Orrin, the first cap snapped, but he tried again and put a ball through Orrin’s cartridge box. The lad then ran and found refuge in the house of an uncle.
* Affidavit of J. Bartholemew before Judge Cradlebaugh.
The outcome of this crime? The arrest of ORRIN and Durfee as the murderers by a Mormon officer; a farcical hearing by a coroner’s jury, with a verdict of assassins unknown; distrusted participants in the crime themselves the object of the Mormon spies and would-be assassins; the robbery of a neighbor who dared to condemn the crime; a vain appeal by Mrs. Parrish to Brigham Young, who told her he “would have stopped it had he known anything about it,” and who, when she persisted in seeking another interview, had her advised to “drop it,” and a failure by the widow to secure even the stolen horses. “The wife of Mr. Parrish told me,” said Judge Cradlebaugh, when he charged the jury concerning this case, “that since then at times she had lived on bread and water, and still there are persons in this community riding about on those horses.”
The effort to have the men concerned in this and similar crimes convicted, forms a part of the history of Judge Cradlebaugh’s judicial career after the “Mormon War,” but it failed. When the grand jury would not bring in indictments, he issued bench warrants for the arrest of the accused, and sent the United States marshal, sustained by a military posse, to serve the papers. It was thus that the affidavits and confessions cited were obtained. Then followed a stampede among the residents of the Springville neighborhood, as the judge explained in his subsequent speech, in Congress, the church officials and civil officers being prominent in the flight, and, when their houses were reached, they were occupied only by many wives and many children. “I am justified,” he told the House of Representatives, “in charging that the Mormons are guilty, and that the Mormon church is guilty, of the crimes, of murder and robbery, as taught in their books of faith.”*
* “I say as a fact that there was no escape for any one that the leaders of the church in southern Utah selected as a victim…. It was a rare thing for a man to escape from the territory with all his property until after the Pacific Railroad was built through Utah.”–LEE, “Mormonism Unveiled,” pp. 275, 287.
Charles Nordhoff, in a Utah letter to the New York Evening Post in May, 1871, said: “A friend said to me this afternoon, ‘I saw a great change in Salt Lake since I was there three years ago. The place is free; the people no longer speak in whispers. Three years ago it was unsafe to speak aloud in Salt Lake City about Mormonism, and you were warned to be cautious.'”
Another of the murders under this dispensation, which Judge Cradlebaugh mentioned as “peculiarly and shockingly prominent,” was that of the Aikin party, in the spring of 1857. This party, consisting of six men, started east from San Francisco in May, 1857, and, falling in with a Mormon train, joined them for protection against the Indians. “When they got to a safer neighborhood, the Californians pushed on ahead. Arriving in Kayesville, twenty-five miles north of Salt Lake City, they were at once arrested as federal spies, and their animals (they had an outfit worth in all, about $25,000) were put into the public corral. When their Mormon fellow-travellers arrived, they scouted the idea that the men even knew of an impending “war,” and the party were told that they would be sent out of the territory. But before they started, a council, held at the call of a Bishop in Salt Lake City, decided on their death.
Four of the party were attacked in camp by their escort while asleep; two were killed at once, and two who escaped temporarily were shot while, as they supposed, being escorted back to Salt Lake City. The two others were attacked by O. P. Rockwell and some associates near the city; one was killed outright, and the other escaped, wounded, and was shot the next day while under the escort of “Bill” Hickman, and, according to the latter, by Young’s order. *
* Brigham’s “Destroying Angel,” p. 128.
A story of the escape of one man from the valley, notwithstanding elaborate plans to prevent his doing so, has been preserved, not in the testimony of repentant participants in his persecution, but in his own words.*
* Leavenworth, Kansas, letter to New York Times, published May 1, 1858.
Frederick Loba was a prosperous resident of Lausanne, Switzerland, where for some years he had been introducing a new principle in gas manufacture, when, in 1853, some friends called his attention to the Mormons’ professions and promises. Loba was induced to believe that all mankind who did not gather in Great Salt Lake Valley would be given over to destruction, and that, not only would his soul be saved by moving there, but that his business opportunities would be greatly advanced. Accordingly he gave up the direction of the gas works at Lausanne, and reached St. Louis in December, 1853, with about $8000 worth of property. There he was made temporary president of a Mormon church, and there he got his first bad impression of the Mormon brotherhood. On the way to Utah his wife died of cholera, leaving six children, from six to twelve years old. Welcomed as all men with property were, he was made Professor of Chemistry in the University, and soon learned many of the church secrets. “These,” to quote his own words, “opened my eyes at once, and I saw at a glance the terrible position in which I was placed. I now found myself in the midst of a wicked and degraded people, shut up in the midst of the mountains, with a large family, and deprived of all resources with which to extricate myself. The conviction had been forced upon my mind that Brigham himself was at the bottom of all the clandestine assassinations, plundering of trains, and robbing of mails.” The manner, too, in which polygamy was practised aroused his intense disgust.
He married as his second wife an English woman, and his family relations were pleasant; but the church officers were distrustful of him. He was again and again urged to marry more wives, being assured that with less than three he could not rise to a high place in the church. “This neglect on my part,” he explained, “and certain remarks that I made with respect to Brigham’s friends, determined the prophet to order my private execution, as I am able to prove by honest and competent witnesses.” Loba adopted every precaution for his own safety, night and day. Then came the news of the Parrish murders, and there was so much alarm among the people that there was talk of the departure of a great many of the dissatisfied. To check this, when the plain threats made in the Tabernacle did not avail, Young had a band of four hundred organized under the name of “Wolf Hunters” (borrowed from their old Hancock County neighbors), whose duty it was to see that “the wolves” did not stray abroad.
Loba now communicated his fears to his wife, and found that she also realized the danger of their position, and was ready to advise the risk of flight. The plan, as finally decided on, was that they two should start alone on April l, leaving the children in care of the wife’s mother and brother, the latter a recent comer not yet initiated in the church mysteries.
At ten o’clock on the appointed night Loba and his wife–the latter dressed in men’s clothes–stole out of their house. Their outfit consisted of one blanket, twelve pounds of crackers, a little tea and sugar, a double-barrelled gun, a sword, and a compass. They were without horses, and their route compelled them to travel the main road for twenty-five miles before they reached the mountains, amid which they hoped to baffle pursuit. They were fortunate enough to gain the mountains without detention. There they laid their course, not with a view to taking the easiest or most direct route, but one so far up the mountain sides that pursuit by horsemen would be impossible. This entailed great suffering. The nights were so cold that sometimes they feared to sleep. Add to this the necessity of wading through creeks in ice- cold water, and it is easy to understand that Loba had difficulty to prevent his companion from yielding to despair.
Their objective point was Greene River (170 miles from Salt Lake City by road, but probably almost 300 by the route taken), where they expected to find Indians on whose mercy they would throw themselves. Two days before that river was reached they ate the last of their food, and they kept from freezing at night by getting some sage wood from underneath the snow, and using Loba’s pocket journal for kindling. Mrs. Loba had to be carried the whole of the last six miles, but this effort brought them to a camp of Snake Indians, among whom were some Canadian traders, and there they received a kindly welcome. News of their escape reached Salt Lake City, and Surveyor General Burr sent them the necessary supplies and a guide to conduct them to Fort Laramie, where, a month later, all the rest of the family joined them, in good health, but entirely destitute.
They then learned that, as soon as their flight was discovered, the church authorities sent out horsemen in every direction to intercept them, but their route over the mountains proved their preservation*
* Referring to the frequent Mormon declarations that there were fewer deeds of violence in Utah than in other pioneer settlements of equal population, the Salt Lake Tribune of January 25, 1876, said: “It is estimated that no less than 600 murders have been committed by the Mormons, in nearly every case at the instigation of their priestly leaders, during the occupation of the territory. Giving a mean average of 50,000 persons professing that faith in Utah, we have a murder committed every year to every 2500 of population. The same ratio of crime extended to the population of the United States would give 16,000 murders every year.”
The Messenger, the organ of the Reorganized Church in Salt Lake City, said in November, 1875: “While laying the waste pipes in front of the residence of Brigham Young recently the skeleton of a man–a white man–was dug up. A similar discovery was made last winter in digging a cellar in this city. What can have been the necessity of these secret burials, without coffins, in such places?”
CHAPTER IX. BLOOD ATONEMENT
As early as 1853 intimations of the doctrine that an offending member might be put out of the way were given from the Tabernacle pulpit. Orson Hyde, on April 9 of that year, spoke, in the form of a parable, of the fate of a wolf that a shepherd discovered in his flock of sheep, saying that, if let alone, he would go off and tell the other wolves, and they would come in; “whereas, if the first should meet with his just deserts, he could not go back and tell the rest of his hungry tribe to come and feast themselves on the flock. If you say the priesthood, or authorities of the church here, are the shepherd, and the church is the flock, you can make your own application of this figure.”
In September, 1856, there was a notable service in the bowery in Salt Lake City at which several addresses were made. Heber C. Kimball urged repentance, and told the people that Brigham Young’s word was “the word of God to this people.” Then Jedediah M. Grant first gave open utterance to a doctrine that has given the Saints, in late years, much trouble to explain, and the carrying out of which in Brigham Young’s days has required many a Mormon denial. This is, what has been called in Utah the doctrine of “blood atonement,” and what in reality was the doctrine of human sacrifice.
Grant declared that some persons who had received the priesthood committed adultery and other abominations, “get drunk, and wallow in the mire and filth.” “I say,” he continued, “there are men and women that I would advise to go to the President immediately, and ask him to appoint a committee to attend to their case; and then let a place be selected, and let that committee shed their blood. We have those amongst us that are full of all manner of abominations; those who need to have their blood shed, for water will not do; their sins are too deep for that.”* He explained that he was only preaching the doctrine of St. Paul, and continued: “I would ask how many covenant breakers there are in this city and in this kingdom. I believe that there are a great many; and if they are covenant breakers, we need a place designated where we can shed their blood…. If any of you ask, Do I mean you, I answer yes. If any woman asks, Do I mean her, I answer yes…. We have been trying long enough with these people, and I go in for letting the sword of the Almighty be unsheathed, not only in word, but in deed.”**
* Elder C. W. Penrose made an explanation of the view taken by the church at that time, in an address in Salt Lake City on October 12, 1884, that was published in a pamphlet entitled “Blood Atonement as taught by Leading Elders.” This was deemed necessary to meet the criticisms of this doctrine. He pleaded misrepresentation of the Saints’ position, and defined it as resting on Christ’s atonement, and on the belief that that atonement would suffice only for those who have fellowship with Him. He quoted St. Paul as authority for the necessity of blood shedding (Hebrews ix. 22), and Matthew xii. 31, 32, and Hebrews x. 26, to show that there are sins, like blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which will not be forgiven through the shedding of Christ’s blood. He also quoted 1 John v. 16 as showing that the apostle and Brigham Young were in agreement concerning “sins unto death,” just as Young and the apostle agreed about delivering men unto Satan that their spirits might be saved through the destruction of their flesh (1 Corinthians v. 5). Having justified the teaching to his satisfaction, he proceeded to challenge proof that any one had ever paid the penalty, coupling with this a denial of the existence of Danites.
Elder Hyde, in his “Mormonism,” says (p. 179): “There are several men now living in Utah whose lives are forfeited by Mormon law, but spared for a little time by Mormon policy. They are certain to be killed, and they know it. They are only allowed to live while they add weight and influence to Mormonism, and, although abundant opportunities are given them for escape, they prefer to remain. So strongly are they infatuated with their religion that they think their salvation depends on their continued obedience, and their ‘blood being shed by the servants of God.’ Adultery is punished by death, and it is taught, unless the adulterer’s blood be shed, he can have no remission for this sin. Believing this firmly, there are men who have confessed this crime to Brigham, and asked him to have them killed. Their superstitious fears make life a burden to them, and they would commit suicide were not that also a crime.”
** Journal of Discourses, Vol. IV, pp. 49, 50.
Brigham Young, who followed Grant, said that he would explain how judgment would be “laid to the line.” “There are sins,” he explained, “that men commit, for which they cannot receive forgiveness in this world nor in that which is to come; and, if they had their eyes open to see their true condition, they would be perfectly willing to have their blood spilt upon the ground, that the smoke thereof might ascend to heaven for their sins…I know, when you hear my brethren telling about cutting people off from the earth, that you consider it a strong doctrine; but it is to save them, not to destroy them.”
That these were not the mere expressions of a sudden impulse is shown by the fact that Young expounded this doctrine at even greater length a year later. Explaining what Christ meant by loving our neighbors as ourselves, he said: “Will you love your brothers and sisters likewise when they have committed a sin that cannot be atoned for without the shedding of blood? Will you love that man or woman well enough to shed their blood? That is what Jesus Christ meant…. I have seen scores and hundreds of people for whom there would have been a chance (in the last resurrection there will be) if their lives had been taken, and their blood spilled on the ground as a smoking incense to the Almighty, but who are now angels to the devil.”*
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. IV, pp. 219, 220.
Stenhouse relates, as one of the “few notable cases that have properly illustrated the blood atonement doctrine,” that one of the wives of an elder who was sent on a mission broke her marriage vows during his absence. On his return, during the height of the “Reformation,” she was told that “she could not reach the circle of the gods and goddesses unless her blood was shed,” and she consented to accept the punishment. Seating herself, therefore, on her husband’s knee, she gave him a last kiss, and he then drew a knife across her throat. “That kind and loving husband still lives near Salt Lake City (1874), and preaches occasionally with great zeal.”*
* “Rocky Mountain Saints,” p. 470.
John D. Lee, who says that this doctrine was “justified by all the people,” gives full particulars of another instance. Among the Danish converts in Utah was Rosmos Anderson, whose wife had been a widow with a grown daughter. Anderson desired to marry his step-daughter also, and she was quite willing; but a member of the Bishop’s council wanted the girl for his wife, and he was influential enough to prevent Anderson from getting the necessary consent from the head of the church. Knowing the professed horror of the church toward the crime of adultery, Anderson and the young woman, at one of the meetings during the “Reformation,” confessed their guilt of that crime, thinking that in this way they would secure permission to marry. But, while they were admitted to rebaptism on their confession, the coveted permit was not issued and they were notified that to offend would be to incur death. Such a charge was very soon laid against Anderson (not against the girl), and the same council, without hearing him, decided that he must die. Anderson was so firm in the Mormon faith that he made no remonstrance, simply asking half a day for preparation. His wife provided clean clothes for the sacrifice, and his executioners dug his grave. At midnight they called for him, and, taking him to the place, allowed him to kneel by the grave and pray. Then they cut his throat, “and held him so that his blood ran into the grave.” His wife, obeying instructions, announced that he had gone to California.*
* “Mormonism Unveiled,” p. 282.
As an illustration of the opportunity which these times gave a polygamous priesthood to indulge their tastes, may be told the story of “the affair at San Pete.” Bishop Warren Snow of Manti, San Pete County, although the husband of several wives, desired to add to his list a good-looking young woman in that town When he proposed to her, she declined the honor, informing him that she was engaged to a younger man. The Bishop argued with her on the ground of her duty, offering to have her lover sent on a mission, but in vain. When even the girl’s parents failed to gain her consent, Snow directed the local church authorities to command the young man to give her up. Finding him equally obstinate, he was one evening summoned to attend a meeting where only trusted members were present. Suddenly the lights were put out, he was beaten and tied to a bench, and Bishop Snow himself castrated him with a bowie knife. In this condition he was left to crawl to some haystacks, where he lay until discovered “The young man regained his health,” says Lee, “but has been an idiot or quiet lunatic ever since, and is well known by hundreds of Mormons or Gentiles in Utah.”* And the Bishop married the girl. Lee gives Young credit for being very “mad” when he learned of this incident, but the Bishop was not even deposed.**
* Ibid., p. 285.
** Stenhouse quotes the following as showing that the San Pete outrage was scarcely concealed by the Mormon authorities: “I was at a Sunday meeting, in the spring of 1857, in Provo, when the news of the San Pete incident was referred to by the presiding Bishop, Blackburn. Some men in Provo had rebelled against authority in some trivial matter, and Blackburn shouted in his Sunday meeting–a mixed congregation of all ages and both sexes: ‘I want the people of Provo to understand that the boys in Provo can use the knife as well as the boys in San Pete. Boys, get your knives ready.'” “Rocky Mountain Saints,” p. 302.
CHAPTER X. The Territorial Government–Judge Brocchus’s Experience
In March, 1851, the two houses of the legislature of Deseret, sitting together, adopted resolutions “cheerfully and cordially” accepting the law providing a territorial government for Utah, and tendering Union Square in Salt Lake City as a site for the government buildings. The first territorial election was held on August 4, and the legislative assembly then elected held its first meeting on September 22. An act was at once passed continuing in force the laws passed by the legislature of Deseret (an unauthorized body) not in conflict with the territorial law, and locating the capital in the Pauvan Valley, where the town was afterward named Fillmore* and the county Millard, in honor of the President.
* Only one session of the legislature was held at Fillmore (December, 1855). The lawmakers afterward met there, but only to adjourn to Salt Lake City.
The federal law, establishing the territory, provided that the governor, secretary, chief justice and two associate justices of the Supreme Court, the attorney general, or state’s attorney, and marshal should be appointed by the President of the United States. President Fillmore on September 22, 1850, filled these places as follows: governor, Brigham Young; secretary, B. D. Harris of Vermont; chief justice, Joseph Buffington of Pennsylvania; associate justices, Perry E. Brocchus and Zerubbabel Snow; attorney general, Seth M. Blair of Utah; marshal, J. L. Heywood of Utah, Young, Snow, Blair, and Heywood being Mormons. L. G. Brandebury was later appointed chief justice, Mr. Buffington declining that office.
The selection of Brigham Young as governor made him, in addition to his church offices, ex-officio commander-in-chief of the militia and superintendent of Indian affairs, the latter giving him a salary of $1000 a year in addition to his salary of $1500 as governor. Had the character of the Mormon church government been understood by President Fillmore, it does not seem possible that he would, by Young’s appointment, have so completely united the civil and religious authority of the territory in one man; or, if he had had any comprehension of Young’s personal characteristics, it is fair to conclude that the appointment would not have been made.
The voice which the President listened to in the matter was that of that adroit Mormon agent, Colonel Thomas L. Kane. Kane’s part in the business came out after these appointments were announced, and after the Buffalo (New York) Courier had printed a communication attacking Young’s character on the ground of his record both in Illinois and Utah. President Fillmore sent these charges to Kane (on July 4, 1851) with a letter in which he said, “You will recollect that I relied much upon you for the moral character of Mr. Young,” and asking him to “truly state whether these charges against the moral character of Governor Young are true.” Kane sent two letters in reply, dated July 11. In a short open one he said: “I reiterate without reserve the statement of his excellent capacity, energy, and integrity, which I made you prior to the appointment. I am willing to say that I VOLUNTEERED to communicate to you the facts by which I was convinced of his patriotism and devotion to the Union. I made no qualification when I assured you of his irreproachable moral character, because I was able to speak of this from my own intimate personal knowledge.”
The second letter, marked “personal,” went into these matters much more in detail. It declared that the tax levied by Young on non-Mormons who sold goods in Salt Lake City was a liquor tax, creditable to Mormon temperance principles. Had the President consulted the report of the debate on Babbitt’s admission as a Delegate, he would have discovered that this was falsehood number one. The charges against Young while in Illinois, including counterfeiting, Kane swept aside as “a mere rehash of old libels,” and he cited the Battalion as an illustration of Mormon patriotism. The extent to which he could go in falsifying in Young’s behalf is illustrated, however, most pointedly in what he had to say regarding the charge of polygamy: “The remaining charge connects itself with that unmixed outrage, the spiritual wife story; which was fastened on the Mormons by a poor ribald scamp whom, though the sole surviving brother and representative of their Jo. Smith, they were literally forced to excommunicate for licentiousness, and who therefore revenged himself by editing confessions and disclosures of savor to please the public that peruses novels in yellow paper covers.”* In regard to William Smith, the fact was that he opposed polygamy both before and after his expulsion from the church. Kane’s stay among the Mormons on the Missouri must have acquainted him with the practically open practice of polygamy at that time. His entire correspondence with Fillmore stamps him as a man whose word could be accepted on no subject. It would have been well if President Buchanan had availed himself of the existence of these letters. Fillmore stated in later years that at that time neither he nor the Senate knew that polygamy was an accepted Mormon doctrine.
* For correspondence in full, see Millennial Star, Vol. XIII, pp. 341-344.
Young took the oath of office as governor in February, 1851. The non-Mormon federal officers arrived in June and July following, and with them came Babbitt, bringing $20,000 which had been appropriated by Congress for a state-house, and J. M. Bernhisel, the first territorial Delegate to Congress, with a library purchased by him in the East for which Congress had provided. The arrival of the Gentile officers gave a speedy opportunity to test the temper of the church in regard to any interference with, or even discussion of, their “peculiar” institutions or Young’s authority.
Their first welcome was cordial, with balls and dinners at the Bath House at the Hot Springs at which, for their special benefit, says a local historian, was served “champagne wine from the grocery,” with home-brewed porter and ale for the rest. When Judge Brocchus reached Salt Lake City, his two non-Mormon associates had been there long enough to form an opinion of the Mormon population and of the aims of the leading church officers. They soon concluded that “no man else could govern them against Brigham Young’s influence, without a military force,”* and they heard many expressions, public and private, indicating the contempt in which the federal government was held. The anniversary of the arrival of the pioneers, July 24, was always celebrated with much ceremony, and that year the principal addresses were made by “General” D. H. Wells and Brigham Young. Some of the new officers occupied seats on the platform. Wells attacked the government for “requiring” the Battalion to enlist. Young paid especial attention to President Taylor, who had recently died, and whose course toward the Mormons did not please them, closing this part of his remarks with the declaration, “but Zachary Taylor is dead and in hell, and I am glad of it,” adding, “and I prophesy in the name of Jesus Christ, by the power of the priesthood that’s upon me, that any President of the United States who lifts his finger against this people, shall die an untimely death, and go to hell.”
* Report of the three officers to President Fillmore, Ex. Doc. No. 25, 1st Session, 32d Congress.
Judge Brocchus had been commissioned by the Washington Monument Association to ask the people of the territory for a block of stone for that structure, and, on signifying a desire to make known his commission, he was invited to do so at the General Conference to be held on September 7 and 8. The judge thought that, with the life of Washington as a text, he could read these people a lesson on their duty toward the government, and could correct some of the impressions under which they rested. The idea itself only showed how little he understood anything pertaining to Mormonism.
There was no newspaper in Salt Lake City in that time, and for a report of the judge’s address and of Brigham Young’s reply, we must rely on the report of the three federal officers to President Fillmore, on a letter from Judge Brocchus printed in the East, and on three letters on the subject addressed to the New York Herald (one of which that journal printed, and all of which the author published in a pamphlet entitled “The Truth for the Mormons”,) by J. M. Grant, first mayor of Salt Lake City, major general of the Legion, and Speaker of the house in the Deseret legislature.
Judge Brocchus spoke for two hours. He began with expressions of sympathy for the sufferings of the Mormons in Missouri and Illinois, and then referred to the unfriendliness of the people toward the federal government, pointing out what he considered its injustice, and alluding pointedly to Brigham Young’s remarks about President Taylor. He defended the President’s memory, and told his audience that, “if they could not offer a block of marble for the Washington Monument in a feeling of full fellowship with the people of the United States, as brethren and fellow citizens, they had better not offer it at all, but leave it unquarried in the bosom of its native mountain.” The officers’ report to President Fillmore says that the address “was entirely free from any allusions, even the most remote, to the peculiar religion of the community, or to any of their domestic or social customs.” Even if the Mormons had so construed it, the rebuke of their lack of patriotism would have aroused their resentment, and Bernhisel, in a letter to President Fillmore, characterized it as “a wanton insult.”
But the judge did make, according to other reports, what was construed as an uncomplimentary reference to polygamy, and this stirred the church into a tumult of anger and indignation. According to Mormon accounts,* the judge, addressing the ladies, said: “I have a commission from the Washington Monument Association, to ask of you a block of marble, as a test of your citizenship and loyalty to the government of the United States. But in order to do it acceptably you must become virtuous, and teach your daughters to become virtuous, or your offering had better remain in the bosom of your native mountains.”
* The report of what follows, including Young’s address, is taken from Grant’s pamphlet…
Mild as this language may seem, no Mormon audience, since the marrying of more wives than one had been sanctioned by the church, had ever listened to anything like it. To permit even this interference with their “religious belief” was entirely foreign to Young’s purpose, and he took the floor in a towering rage to reply. “Are you a judge,” he asked, “and can’t even talk like a lawyer or a politician?” George Washington was first in war, but he was first in peace, too, and Young could handle a sword as well as Washington. “But you [addressing the judge] standing there, white and shaking now at the howls which you have stirred up yourself–you are a coward…. Old General Taylor, what was he?* A mere soldier with regular army buttons on; no better to go at the head of brave troops than a dozen I could pick out between here and Laramie.” He concluded thus:–
* In a discourse on June 19, 1853, Young said that he never heard of his alleged expression about General Taylor until Judge Brocchus made use of it, but he added: “When he made the statement there, I surely bore testimony to the truth of it. But until then I do not know that it ever came into my mind whether Taylor was in hell or not, any more than it did that any other wicked man was there,” etc.–Journal of Discourses, Vol. 1, p. 185.
“What you have been afraid to intimate about our morals I will not stoop to notice, except to make my particular personal request to every brother and husband present not to give you back what such impudence deserves. You talk of things you have on hearsay since your coming among us. I’ll talk of hearsay then– the hearsay that you are discontented, and will go home, because we cannot make it worth your while to stay. What it would satisfy you to get out of us I think it would be hard to tell; but I am sure that it is more than you’ll get. If you or any one else is such a baby-calf, we must sugar your soap to coax you to wash yourself of Saturday nights. Go home to your mammy straight away, and the sooner the better.”
This was the language addressed by the governor of the territory and the head of the church, to one of the Supreme Court judges appointed by the President of the United States!
Young alluded to his reference to the judge’s personal safety in a discourse on June 19, 1853, in which, speaking of the judge’s remarks, he said: “They [the Mormons] bore the insult like saints of God. It is true, as it was said in the report of these affairs, if I had crooked my little finger, he would have been used up, but I did not bend it. If I had, the sisters alone felt indignant enough to have chopped him in pieces.” A little later, in the same discourse, he added: “Every man that comes to impose on this people, no matter by whom they are sent, or who they are that are sent, lay the axe at the root of the tree to kill themselves. I will do as I said I would last conference. Apostates, or men who never made any profession of religion, had better be careful how they come here, lest I should bend my little finger.”*
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. I, p. 187.
If the records of the Mormon church had included acts as well as words, how many times would we find that Young’s little finger was bent to a purpose?
Bold as he was, Young seems to have felt that he had gone too far in his abuse of Judge Brocchus, and on September 19 he addressed a note to him, inviting him to attend a public meeting in the bowery the next Sunday morning, “to explain, satisfy, or apologize to the satisfaction of the ladies who heard your address on the 8th,” a postscript assuring the judge that “no gentleman will be permitted to make any reply.” The judge in polite terms declined this offer, saying that he had been, at the proper time, denied a chance to explain, “at the peril of having my hair pulled or my throat cut.” He added that his speech was deliberately prepared, that his sole design was “to vindicate the government of the United States from those feelings of prejudice and that spirit of defection which seemed to pervade the public sentiment,” and that he had had no intention to offer insult or disrespect to his audience. This called out, the next day, a very long reply from Young, of which the following is a paragraph: “With a war of words on party politics, factions, religious schisms, current controversy of creeds, policy of clans or state clipper cliques, I have nothing to do; but when the eternal principles of truth are falsified, and light is turned into darkness by mystification of language or a false delineation of facts, so that the just indignation of the true, virtuous, upright citizens of the commonwealth is aroused into vigilance for the dear-bought liberties of themselves and fathers, and that spirit of intolerance and persecution which has driven this people time and time again from their peaceful homes, manifests itself in the flippancy of rhetoric for female insult and desecration, it is time that I forbear to hold my peace, lest the thundering anathemas of nations, born and unborn, should rest upon my head, when the marrow of my bones shall be ill prepared to sustain the threatened blow.”*
* For correspondence in full, see Tullidge’s “History of Salt Lake City,” pp. 86–91.
Judge Brocchus wrote to a friend in the East, on September 20: “How it will end, I do not know. I have just learned that I have been denounced, together with the government and officers, in the bowery again to-day by Governor Young. I hope I shall get off safely. God only knows. I am in the power of a desperate and murderous sect.”
The non-Mormon federal officers now announced their determination to abandon their places and return to the East. Young foresaw that so radical a course would give his conduct a wide advertisement, and attract to him an unpleasant notoriety. He, therefore, called on the offended judges personally, and urged them to remain.* Being assured that they would not reconsider their determination, and that Secretary Harris would take with him the $24,000 appropriated for the pay and mileage of the territorial legislature, Young, on September 18, issued a proclamation declaring the result of the election of August 4, which he had neglected to do, and convening the legislature in session on September 22. “So solicitous was the governor that the secretary and other non-Mormon officers should be kept in ignorance of this step,” says the report of the latter to President Fillmore, “that on the 19th, two days after the date of a personal notice sent to members, he most positively and emphatically denied, as communicated to the secretary, that any such notice had been issued.”
* Young to the President, House Doc. No. 25, 1st Session, 32d Congress.
As soon as the legislature met, it passed resolutions directing the United States marshal to take possession of all papers and property (including money) in the hands of Secretary Harris, and to arrest him and lock him up if he offered any resistance. On receipt of a copy of this resolution, Secretary Harris sent a reply, giving several reasons for refusing to hand over the money appropriated for the legislature, among them the failure of the governor to have a census taken before the election, as provided by the territorial act, the defective character of the governor’s proclamation ordering the election, allowing aliens to vote, and the governor’s failure to declare the result of the election, his delayed proclamation being pronounced “worthless for all legal purposes.”
On September 28 the three non-Mormon officers took their departure, carrying with them to Washington the disputed money, which was turned over to the proper officer.*
* Tullidge, in his “History of Salt Lake City,” says: “Under the censure of the great statesman, Daniel Webster, and with ex- Vice President Dallas and Colonel Kane using their potent influence against them, and also Stephen A. Douglas, Brandebury, Brocchus, and Harris were forced to retire.” As these officers left the territory of their own accord, and contrary to Brigham Young’s urgent protest, this statement only furnishes another instance of the Mormon plan to attack the reputation of any one whom they could not control. The three officers were criticized by some Eastern newspapers for leaving their post through fear of bodily injury, but Congress voted to pay their salaries.
All the correspondence concerning the failure of this first attempt to establish non-Mormon federal officers in Utah was given to Congress in a message from President Fillmore, dated January 9, 1852. The returned officers made a report which set forth the autocratic attitude of the Mormon church, the open practice of polygamy,* and the non-enforcement of the laws, not even murderers being punished. Of one of the allegations of murder set forth,–that a man from Ithaca, New York, named James Munroe, was murdered on his way to Salt Lake City by a member of the church, his body brought to the city and buried without an inquest, the murderer walking the streets undisturbed, H. H. Bancroft says, “There is no proof of this statement.”** On the contrary, Mayor Grant in his “Truth for the Mormons” acknowledges it, and gives the details of the murder, justifying it on the ground of provocation, alleging that while Egan, the murderer, was absent in California, Munroe, “from his youth up a member of the church, Egan’s friend too, therefore a traitor,” seduced Egan’s wife.
* J. D. Grant, following the example of Colonel Kane, had the affrontery to say of the charge of polygamy, in one of his letters to the New York Herald: “I pronounce it false…. Suppose I should admit it at once? Whose business is it? Does the constitution forbid it?”
** “History of Utah,” p. 460, note.
Young, in a statement to the President, defended his acts and the acts of the territorial legislature, and attacked the character and motives of the federal officers. The legislature soon after petitioned President Fillmore to fill the vacancies by appointing men “who are, indeed, residents amongst us.”
CHAPTER XI. MORMON TREATMENT OF FEDERAL OFFICERS
The next federal officers for Utah appointed by the President (in August, 1852) were Lazarus H. Reid of New York to be chief justice, Leonidas Shaver, associate justice, and B. G. Ferris, secretary. Neither of these officers incurred the Mormon wrath. Both of the judges died while in office, and the next chief justice was John F. Kinney, who had occupied a seat on the Iowa Supreme Bench, with W. W. Drummond of Illinois, and George P. Stiles, one of Joseph Smith’s counsel at the time of the prophet’s death, as associates. A. W. Babbitt received the appointment of secretary of the territory.*
* Some years later Babbitt was killed. Mrs. Waite, in “The Mormon Prophet” (p. 34) says: “In the summer of 1862 Brigham was referring to this affair in a tea-table conversation at which judge Waite and the writer of this were present. After making some remarks to impress upon the minds of those present the necessity of maintaining friendly relations between the federal officers and the authorities of the church, he used language substantially as follows: ‘There is no need of any difficulty, and there need be none if the officers do their duty and mind their affairs. If they do not, if they undertake to interfere with affairs that do not concern them, I will not be far off. There was Almon W. Babbitt. He undertook to quarrel with me, but soon afterward was killed by Indians.”
The territorial legislature had continued to meet from time to time, Young having a seat of honor in front of the Speaker at each opening joint session, and presenting his message. The most important measure passed was an election law which practically gave the church authorities control of the ballot. It provided that each voter must hand his ballot, folded, to the judge of election, who must deposit it after numbering it, and after the clerk had recorded the name and number. This, of course, gave the church officers knowledge concerning the candidate for whom each man voted. Its purpose needs no explanation.
In August, 1854, a force of some three hundred soldiers, under command of Lieutenant Colonel E. J. Steptoe of the United States army, on their way to the Pacific coast, arrived in Salt Lake City and passed the succeeding winter there. Young’s term as governor was about to expire, and the appointment of his successor rested with President Pierce. Public opinion in the East had become more outspoken against the Mormons since the resignation of the first federal officers sent to the territory, the “revelation” concerning polygamy having been publicly avowed meanwhile, and there was an expressed feeling that a non- Mormon should be governor. Accordingly, President Pierce, in December, 1854, offered the governorship to Lieutenant Colonel Steptoe.
Brigham Young, just before and after this period, openly declared that he would not surrender the actual government of the territory to any man. In a discourse in the Tabernacle, on June 19, 1853, in which he reviewed the events of 1851, he said, “We have got a territorial government, and I am and will be governor, and no power can hinder it, until the Lord Almighty says, ‘Brigham, you need not be governor any longer.'”* In a defiant discourse in the Tabernacle, on February 18, 1855, Young again stated his position on this subject: “For a man to come here [as governor] and infringe upon my individual rights and privileges, and upon those of my brethren, will never meet my sanction, and I will scourge such a one until he leaves. I am after him.” Defining his position further, and the independence of his people, he said: “Come on with your knives, your swords, and your faggots of fire, and destroy the whole of us rather than we will forsake our religion. Whether the doctrine of plurality of wives is true or false is none of your business. We have as good a right to adopt tenets in our religion as the Church of England, or the Methodists, or the Baptists, or any other denomination have to theirs.”**
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. 1, p. 187.
** Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 187-188.
Having thus defied the federal appointing power, the nomination of Colonel Steptoe as Young’s successor might have been expected to cause an outbreak; but the Mormon leaders were always diplomatic–at least, when Young did not lose his temper. The outcome of this appointment was its declination by Steptoe, a petition to President Pierce for Young’s reappointment signed by Steptoe himself and all the federal officers in the territory, and the granting of the request of these petitioners.
Mrs. C. B. Waite, wife of Associate Justice C. B. Waite, one of Lincoln’s appointees, gives a circumstantial account of the manner in which Colonel Steptoe was influenced to decline the nomination and sign the petition in favor of Young.* Two women, whose beauty then attracted the attention of Salt Lake City society, were a relative by marriage of Brigham Young and an actress in the church theatre. The federal army officers were favored with a good deal of their society. When Steptoe’s appointment as governor was announced, Young called these women to his assistance. In conformity with the plan then suggested, Young one evening suddenly demanded admission to Colonel Steptoe’s office, which was granted after considerable delay. Passing into the back room, he found the two women there, dressed in men’s clothes and with their faces concealed by their hats. He sent the women home with a rebuke, and then described to Steptoe the danger he was in if the women’s friends learned of the incident, and the disgrace which would follow its exposure. Steptoe’s declination of the nomination and his recommendation of Young soon followed.
President Pierce’s selection of judicial officers for Utah was not made with proper care, nor with due regard to the dignity of the places to be filled. Chief Justice Kinney took with him to Utah a large stock of goods which he sold at retail after his arrival there, and he also kept a boarding-house in Salt Lake City. With his “trade” dependent on Mormon customers, he had every object in cultivating their popularity. Known as a “Jack- Mormon” in Iowa, Mrs. Waite declared that his uniform course, to the time about which she wrote, had been “to aid and abet Brigham Young in his ambitious schemes,” and that he was then “an open apologist and advocate of polygamy.” Judge Drummond’s course in Utah was in many respects scandalous. A former member of the bench in Illinois writes to me: “I remember that when Drummond’s appointment was announced there was considerable comment as to his lack of fitness for the place, and, after the troubles between him and the Mormon leaders got aired through the press, members of the bar from his part of the state said they did not blame the Mormons–that it was an imposition upon them to have sent him out there as a judge. I never heard his moral character discussed.” If the Mormon leaders had shown any respect for the government at Washington, or for the reputable men appointed to territorial offices, more attention might be paid to their hostility manifested to certain individuals.
* “The Mormon Prophet,” p. 36, confirmed by Beadle’s “Life in Utah,” p. 171.
A few of the leading questions at issue under the new territorial officers will illustrate the nature of the government with which they had to deal. The territorial legislature had passed acts defining the powers and duties of the territorial courts. These acts provided that the district courts should have original jurisdiction, both civil and criminal, wherever not otherwise provided by law. Chapter 64 (approved January 14, 1864) provided as follows: “All questions of law, the meaning of writings other than law, and the admissibility of testimony shall be decided by the court; and no laws or parts of laws shall be read, argued, cited, or adopted in any courts, during any trial, except those enacted by the governor and legislative assembly of this territory, and those passed by the Congress of the United States, WHEN APPLICABLE; and no report, decision, or doings of any court shall be read, argued, cited, or adopted as precedent in any other trial.” This obliterated at a stroke the whole body of the English common law. Another act provided that, by consent of the court and the parties, any person could be selected to act as judge in a particular case. As the district court judges were federal appointees, a judge of probate was provided for each county, to be elected by joint ballot of the legislature. These probate courts, besides the authority legitimately belonging to such tribunals, were given “power to exercise original jurisdiction, both civil and criminal, as well in chancery as at common law.” Thus there were in the territory two kinds of courts, to one of which alone a non-Mormon could look for justice, and to the other of which every Mormon would appeal when he was not prevented.
The act of Congress organizing the territory provided for the appointment of a marshal, approved by the President; the territorial legislature on March 3, 1852, provided for another marshal to be elected by joint ballot, and for an attorney general. A nonMormon had succeeded the original Mormon who was appointed as federal marshal, and he took the ground that he should have charge of all business pertaining to the marshal’s office in the United States courts. Judge Stiles having issued writs to the federal marshal, the latter was not able to serve them, and the demand was openly made that only territorial law should be enforced in Utah. When the question of jurisdiction came before the judge, three Mormon lawyers appeared in behalf of the Mormon claim, and one of them, James Ferguson, openly told the judge that, if he decided against him, they “would take him from the bench d–d quick.” Judge Stiles adjourned his court, and applied to Governor Young for assistance; but got only the reply that “the boys had got their spunk up, and he would not interfere,” and that, if Judge Stiles could not enforce the United States laws, the sooner he adjourned court the better.* All the records and papers of the United States court were kept in Judge Stiles’s office. In his absence, Ferguson led a crowd to the office, seized and deposited in a safe belonging to Young the court papers, and, piling up the personal books and papers of the judge in an outhouse, set fire to them. The judge, supposing that the court papers were included in the bonfire, innocently made that statement in an affidavit submitted on his return to Washington in 1857.
* This account is given in Mrs. Waite’s “The Mormon Prophet.” Tullidge omits the incident in his “History of Salt Lake City.”
Judge Drummond, reversing the policy of Chief Justice Kinney and Judge Shaver, announced, before the opening of the first session of his court, that he should ignore all proceedings of the territorial probate courts except such as pertained to legitimate probate business. This position was at once recognized as a challenge of the entire Mormon judicial system,* and steps were promptly taken to overthrow it. There are somewhat conflicting accounts of the method adopted. Mrs. Waite, in her “Mormon Prophet,” Hickman, in his confessions, and Remy, in his “Journey,” have all described it with variations. All agree that a quarrel was brought about between the judge and a Jew, which led to the arrest of both of them. “During the prosecution of the case,” says Mrs. Waite, “the judge gave some sort of a stipulation that he would not interfere any further with the probate courts.”
* A member of the legislature wrote to his brother in England, of Drummond: He has brass to declare in open court that the Utah laws are founded in ignorance, and has attempted to set some of the most important ones aside,… and he will be able to appreciate the merits of a returned compliment some day.”
* Tullidge, “History of Salt Lake City,” p. 412.
Judge Stiles left the territory in the spring of 1857, and gave the government an account of his treatment in the form of an affidavit when he reached Washington. Judge Drummond held court a short time for Judge Stiles in Carson County (now Nevada)* in the spring of 1857, and then returned to the East by way of California, not concealing his opinion of Mormon rule on the way, and giving the government a statement of the case in a letter resigning his judgeship.
* The settlement of what is now Nevada was begun by both Mormons and non-Mormons in 1854, and, the latter being in the majority, the Utah legislature organized the entire western part of the territory as one county, called Carson, and Governor Young appointed Orson Hyde its probate judge. Many persons coming in after the settlement of California, as miners, farmers, or stock-raisers, the Mormons saw their majority in danger, and ordered the non-Mormons to leave. Both sides took up arms, and they camped in sight of each other for two weeks. The Mormons, learning that their opponents were to receive reenforcements from California, agreed on equal rights for all in that part of the territory; but when the legislature learned of this, it repealed the county act, recalled the judge, and left the district without any legal protection whatever. Thus matters remained until late in 1858, when a probate judge was quietly appointed for Carson Valley. After this an election was held, but although the non-Mormons won at the polls, the officers elected refused to qualify and enforce Mormon statutes.–Letter of Delegate-elect J. M. Crane of Nevada, “The Mormon Prophet,” pp. 4l-45.
After the departure of the non-Mormon federal judges from Utah, the only non-Mormon officers left there were those belonging to the office of the surveyor general, and two Indian agents. Toward these officers the Mormons were as hostile as they had been toward the judges, and the latest information that the government received about the disposition and intentions of the Mormons came from them.
The Mormon view of their title to the land in Salt Lake Valley appeared in Young’s declaration on his first Sunday there, that it was theirs and would be divided by the officers of the church.* Tullidge, explaining this view in his history published in 1886, says that this was simply following out the social plan of a Zion which Smith attempted in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, under “revelation.” He explains: “According to the primal law of colonization, recognized in all ages, it was THEIR LAND if they could hold and possess it. They could have done this so far as the Mexican government was concerned, which government probably never would even have made the first step to overthrow the superstructure of these Mormon society builders. At that date, before this territory was ceded to the United States, Brigham Young, as the master builder of the colonies which were soon to spread throughout these valleys, could with absolute propriety give the above utterances on the land question.”**
* “They will not, however, without protest, buy the land, and hope that grants will be made to actual settlers or the state, sufficient to cover their improvements. If not, the state will be obliged to buy, and then confirm the titles already given.”– Gunnison. “The Mormons,” 1852, p. 414.
** Captain Gunnison, who as lieutenant accompanied Stansbury’s surveying party and printed a book giving his personal observations, was murdered in 1853 while surveying a railroad route at a camp on Sevier River. His party were surprised by a band of Pah Utes while at breakfast, and nine of them were killed. The charge was often made that this massacre was inspired by Mormons, but it has not been supported by direct evidence.
When the act organizing the territory was passed, very little of the Indian title to the land had been extinguished, and the Indians made bitter complaints of the seizure of their homes and hunting-grounds, and the establishment of private rights to canons and ferries, by the people who professed so great a regard for the “Lamanites.” Congress, in February, 1855, created the office of surveyor general of Utah and defined his duties. The presence of this officer was resented at once, and as soon as Surveyor General David H. Burr arrived in Salt Lake City the church directed all its members to convey their lands to Young as trustee in trust for the church, “in consideration of the good will which—- have to the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.” Explaining this order in a discourse in the Tabernacle on March 1, 1857, H. C. Kimball said: “I do not compel you to do it; the trustee in trust does not; God does not. But He says that if you will do this and the other things which He has counselled for our good, do so and prove Him…. If you trifle with me when I tell you the truth, you will trifle with Brother Brigham, and if you trifle with him you will also trifle with angels and with God, and thus you will trifle yourselves down to hell.”*
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. IV, pp. 249, 252.
The Mormon policy toward the surveyors soon took practical shape. On August 30, 1856, Burr reported a nearly fatal assault on one of his deputies by three Danites. Deputy Surveyor Craig reported efforts of the Mormons to stir up the Indians against the surveyors, and quoted a suggestion of the Deseret News that the surveyors be prosecuted in the territorial court for trespass. In February, 1857, Burr reported a visit he had had from the clerk of the Supreme Court, the acting district attorney, and the territorial marshal, who told him plainly that the country was theirs.
They showed him a copy of a report that he had made to Washington, charging Young with extensive depredations, warned him that he could not write to Washington without their knowledge, and ordered that such letter writing should stop. “The fact is,” Burr added, “these people repudiate the authority of the United States in this country, and are in open rebellion against the general government…. So strong have been my apprehensions of danger to the surveyors that I scarcely deemed it prudent to send any out…. We are by no means sure that we will be permitted to leave, for it is boldly asserted we would not get away alive.”* He did escape early in the spring.
* For text of reports, see House Ex. Doc. No. 71, 1st Session, 35th Congress.
The reports of the Indian agents to the commissioner at Washington at this time were of the same character. Mormon trespasses on Indian land had caused more than one conflict with the savages, but, when there was a prospect of hostilities with the government, the Mormons took steps to secure Indian aid. In May, 1855, Indian Agent Hurt called the attention of the commissioner at Washington to the fact that the Mormons at their recent Conference had appointed a large number of missionaries to preach among the “Lamanites”; that these missionaries were “a class of lawless young men,” and, as their influence was likely to be in favor of hostilities with the whites, he suggested that all Indian officers receive warning on the subject. Hurt was added to the list of fugitive federal officers from Utah, deeming it necessary to flee when news came of the approach of the troops in the fall of 1857. His escape was quite dramatic, some of his Indian friends assisting him. They reached General Johnston’s camp about the middle of October, after suffering greatly from hunger and cold.
The Mormon leaders could scarcely fail to realize that a point must be reached when the federal government would assert its authority in Utah territory, but they deemed a conflict with the government of less serious moment than a surrender which would curtail their own civil and criminal jurisdiction, and bring their doctrine of polygamy within reach of the law. A specimen of the unbridled utterances of these leaders in those days will be found in a discourse by Mayor Grant in the Tabernacle, on March 2, 1856:–
“Who is afraid to die? None but the wicked. If they want to send troops here, let them come to those who have imported filth and whores, though we can attend to that class without so much expense to the Government. They will threaten us with United States troops! Why, your impudence and ignorance would bring a blush to the cheek of the veriest camp-follower among them. We ask no odds of you, you rotten carcasses, and I am not going to bow one hair’s breadth to your influence. I would rather be cut into inch pieces than succumb one particle to such filthiness …. If we were to establish a whorehouse on every corner of our streets, as in nearly all other cities outside of Utah, either by law or otherwise, we should doubtless then be considered good fellows.”*
* Journal of Discourses, Vol. III, pp. 234-235
Two weeks later Brigham Young, in a sermon in the same place, said, “I said then, and I shall always say, that I shall be governor as long as the Lord Almighty wishes me to govern this people.*
* Ibid., p. 258.
In January, 1853, Orson Pratt, as Mormon representative, began the publication in Washington, D.C., of a monthly periodical called The Seer, in which he defended polygamy, explained the Mormon creed, and set forth the attitude of the Mormons toward the United States government. The latter subject occupied a large part of the issue of January, 1854, in the shape of questions and answers. The following will give an illustration of their tone:–
“Q.–In what manner have the people of the United States treated the divine message contained in the Book of Mormon?
“A.–They have closed their eyes, their ears, their hearts and their doors against it. They have scorned, rejected and hated the servants of God who were sent to bear testimony of it.
“Q.–In what manner has the United States treated the Saints who have believed in this divine message?
“A.–They have proceeded to the most savage and outrageous persecutions;… dragged little children from their hiding-places, and, placing the muzzles of their guns to their heads, have blown out their brains, with the most horrid oaths and imprecations. They have taken the fair daughters of American citizens, bound them on benches used for public worship, and there, in great numbers, ravished them until death came to their relief.”
Further answers were in the shape of an argument that the federal government was responsible for the losses of the Saints in Missouri and Illinois.
CHAPTER XII. THE MORMON “WAR”
The government at Washington and the people of the Eastern states knew a good deal more about Mormonism in 1856 than they did when Fillmore gave the appointment of governor to Young in 1850. The return of one federal officer after another from Utah with a report that his office was untenable, even if his life was not in danger, the practical nullification of federal law, and the light that was beginning to be shed on Mormon social life by correspondents of Eastern newspapers had aroused enough public interest in the matter to lead the politicians to deem it worthy of their attention. Accordingly, the Republican National Convention, in June, 1856, inserted in its platform a plank declaring that the constitution gave Congress sovereign power over the territories, and that “it is both the right and the duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism–polygamy and slavery.”
A still more striking proof of the growing political importance of the Mormon question was afforded by the attention paid to it by Stephen A. Douglas in a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1856, when he was hoping to secure the Democratic nomination for President. This former friend of the Mormons, their spokesman in the Senate, now declared that reports from the territory seemed to justify the belief that nine-tenths of its inhabitants were aliens; that all were bound by horrid oaths and penalties to recognize and maintain the authority of Brigham Young; and that the Mormon government was forming alliances with the Indians, and organizing Danite bands to rob and murder American citizens. “Under this view of the subject,” said he, “I think it is the duty of the President, as I have no doubt it is his fixed purpose, to remove Brigham Young and all his followers from office, and to fill their places with bold, able, and true men; and to cause a thorough and searching investigation into all the crimes and enormities which are alleged to be perpetrated daily in that territory under the direction of Brigham Young and his confederates; and to use all the military force necessary to protect the officers in discharge of their duties and to enforce the laws of the land. When the authentic evidence shall arrive, if it shall establish the facts which are believed to exist, it will become the duty of Congress to apply the knife, and cut out this loathsome, disgusting ulcer.”*
* Text of the speech in New York Times of June 23, 1856.
This, of course, caused the Mormons to pour out on Judge Douglas the vials of their wrath, and, when he failed to secure the presidential nomination, they found in his defeat the verification of one of Smith’s prophecies.
The Mormons, on their part, had never ceased their demands for statehood, and another of their efforts had been made in the preceding spring, when a new constitution of the State of Deseret was adopted by a convention over which the notorious Jedediah M. Grant presided, and sent to Washington with a memorial pleading for admission to the Union, “that another star, shedding mild radiance from the tops of the mountains, midway between the borders of the Eastern and Western civilization, may add its effulgence to that bright light now so broadly illumining the governmental pathway of nations”; and declaring that “the loyalty of Utah has been variously and most thoroughly tested.” Congress treated this application with practical contempt, the Senate laying the memorial on the table, and the chairman of the House Committee on Territories, Galusha A. Grow, refusing to present the constitution to the House.
Alarmed at the manifestations of public feeling in the East, and the demand that President Buchanan should do something to vindicate at least the dignity of the government, the Mormon leaders and press renewed their attacks on the character of all the federal officers who had criticized them, and the Deseret News urged the President to send to Utah “one or more civilians on a short visit to look about them and see what they can see, and return and report.” The value of observations by such “short visitors” on such occasions need not be discussed.
President Buchanan, instead of following any Mormon advice, soon after his inauguration directed the organization of a body of troops to march to Utah to uphold the federal authorities, and in July, after several persons had declined the office, appointed as governor of Utah Alfred Cumming of Georgia. The appointee was a brother of Colonel William Cumming, who won renown as a soldier in the War of 1812, who was a Union party leader in the nullification contest in Jackson’s time, and who was a participant in a duel with G. McDuffie that occupied a good deal of attention. Alfred Cumming had filled no more important positions than those of mayor of Augusta, Georgia, sutler in the Mexican War, and superintendent of Indian affairs on the upper Missouri. A much more commendable appointment made at the same time was that of D. R. Eckles, a Kentuckian by birth, but then a resident of Indiana, to be chief justice of the territory. John Cradlebaugh and C. E. Sinclair were appointed associate justices, with John Hartnett as secretary, and Peter K. Dotson as marshal. The new governor gave the first illustration of his conception of his duties by remaining in the East, while the troops were moving, asking for an increase of his salary, a secret service fund, and for transportation to Utah. Only the last of these requests was complied with.
President Buchanan’s position as regards Utah at this time was thus stated in his first annual message to Congress (December 8, 1857):–
“The people of Utah almost exclusively belong to this [Mormon] church, and, believing with a fanatical spirit that he [Young] is Governor of the Territory by divine appointment, they obey his commands as if these were direct revelations from heaven. If, therefore, he chooses that his government shall come into collision with the government of the United States, the members of the Mormon church will yield implicit obedience to his will. Unfortunately, existing facts leave but little doubt that such is his determination. Without entering upon a minute history of occurrences, it is sufficient to say that all the officers of the United States, judicial and executive, with the single exception of two Indian agents, have found it necessary for their own safety to withdraw from the Territory, and there no longer remained any government in Utah but the despotism of Brigham Young. This being the condition of affairs in the Territory, I could not mistake the path of duty. As chief executive magistrate, I was bound to restore the supremacy of the constitution and laws within its limits. In order to effect this purpose, I appointed a new governor and other federal officers for Utah, and sent with them a military force for their protection, and to aid as a posse comitatus in case of need in the execution of the laws.
“With the religious opinions of the Mormons, as long as they remained mere opinions, however deplorable in themselves and revolting to the moral and religious sentiments of all Christendom, I have no right to interfere. Actions alone, when in violation of the constitution and laws of the United States, become the legitimate subjects for the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate. My instructions to Governor Cumming have, therefore, been framed in strict accordance with these principles.”
This statement of the situation of affairs in Utah, and of the duty of the President in the circumstances, did not admit of criticism. But the country at that time was in a state of intense excitement over the slavery question, with the situation in Kansas the centre of attention; and it was charged that Buchanan put forward the Mormon issue as a part of his scheme to “gag the North” and force some question besides slavery to the front; and that Secretary of War Floyd eagerly seized the opportunity to remove “the flower of the American army” and a vast amount of munition and supplies to a distant place, remote from Eastern connections. The principal newspapers in this country were intensely partisan in those days, and party organs like the New York Tribune could be counted on to criticise any important step taken by the Democratic President. Such Mormon agents as Colonel Kane and Dr. Bernhisel, the Utah Delegate to Congress, were doing active work in New York and Washington, and some of it with effect. Horace Greeley, in his “Overland journey,” describing his call on Brigham Young a few years later, says that he was introduced by “my friend Dr. Bernhisel.” The “Tribune Almanac” for 1859, in an article on the Utah troubles, quoted as “too true” Young’s declaration that “for the last twenty-five years we have trusted officials of the government, from constables and justices to judges, governors, and presidents, only to be scorned, held in derision, insulted and betrayed.”* Ulterior motives aside, no President ever had a clearer duty than had Buchanan to maintain the federal authority in Utah, and to secure to all residents in and travellers through that territory the rights of life and property. The just ground for criticising him is, not that he attempted to do this, but that he faltered by the way.**
* Greeley’s leaning to the Mormon side was quite persistent, leading him to support Governor Cumming a little later against the federal judges. The Mormons never forgot this. A Washington letter of April 24, 1874, to the New York Times said: “When Mr. Greeley was nominated for President the Mormons heartily hoped for his election. The church organs and the papers taken in the