As head of the Mormon Church and
architect of the Mormon colony in Utah, Brigham Young was almost sole author of
one of the most important chapters in the history of the American West.
Born in 1801 into a poor Vermont farming family, Brigham Young was the ninth
of eleven children. When he was three, his family moved to upstate New York, and
at age sixteen, Young left home to start a career as an itinerant carpenter,
painter, farmer and general handyman. He married his first wife in 1824, and in
1829 the couple moved to Mendon, New York, some forty miles from Manchester,
where Joseph Smith was in the final stages of preparing the Book of Mormon for
publication.
Although he had converted to Methodism in 1823, Young was drawn toward
Smith's newly formed Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from his first
encounter with the Book of Mormon in 1830. Two years later, he was baptized into
the Mormon church, and the same year went to Canada as a missionary. In 1833, a
recent widower, he led several friends and much of his family to join Joseph
Smith and the gathering of Zion in Kirtland, Ohio.
The rest of Young's life was spent in
service to the Mormon Church. He went to Missouri in 1834 when hostile gentiles
(non-Mormons) threatened the Mormon community there, traveled the eastern states
as a missionary, and staunchly supported Joseph Smith when the Kirtland
settlement foundered in 1837. The next year he followed Smith to Missouri, and
when anti-Mormon mobs drove the community out, helped organize the move to
Nauvoo, Illinois. Young carried the Mormon message to England in 1840-41,
gaining many converts among the urban working class. By 1841, his devotion had
so impressed Joseph Smith that he was made the President of the Quorum of Twelve
Apostles, the governing body of the church, second in authority only to Smith
himself.
When Joseph Smith was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob in 1844, Brigham Young
was on the East Coast gathering converts and raising money for the construction
of an enormous temple in Nauvoo. On his return, Young played a critical role in
keeping the savagely persecuted church together by organizing the exodus that
would take the Mormons westward, first to Winter Quarters, Nebraska, in 1846,
and finally on to Utah's Salt lake Valley, where Young and an advance party
arrived on July 24, 1847. Here Young hoped the Mormons would at last find the
freedom to worship and live as their faith decreed. Late in 1847 his leadership
was confirmed when he was named president and prophet of the church, inheriting
the authority of Joseph Smith.
Young met the challenge of making a new
life in Utah by expanding the role and responsibilities of his church. Through
the church he directed political decision-making, economic development, cultural
affairs, law enforcement and education. To strengthen the church and its
authority within Utah, Young constantly encouraged emigration, offering to
finance wagon trains and, for a time, furnishing converts with handcarts so they
could make the 1,400 mile trek on foot. Young also sought to broaden the scope
of church authority by establishing Mormon colonies throughout Utah and in the
neighboring Arizona, Nevada and Idaho territories. Finally, he worked to
insulate the church by making its people economically self-sufficient. He
encouraged the local manufacture of goods that might otherwise be imported from
the east, and he discouraged enterprises, like mining, that might require or
invite outside investors.
Within just a few years, Young achieved outstanding success. In 1851, Utah
was organized as a territory, and Young appointed its governor and superintendent
of Indian Affairs. But as it had in the past, Mormon success raised suspicions
and provoked opposition from those outside the faith. Federal officials began to
fear that Utah would become a theocracy in which church and state were
indistinguishable. And with the announcement in 1852 that plural marriage, or
polygamy, was a basic tenet of the church, there began a public outcry that
accused Mormons of immorality and of thinking they could live outside the laws
of the land. By 1857, these complaints had become so persistent that President
James Buchanan, eager to find some way to distract attention from the issue of
slavery, finally sent an army into Utah to suppress what the Mormon's critics
considered a full-scale rebellion against federal authority.
Buchanan's so-called "Mormon
War," however, would be a war in name only, because Brigham Young chose to
fight the government by cutting off its troops' supply lines rather than engage
them in battle. The conflict did, however, give rise to an incident which still
haunts Young's reputation, the September 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre,
in which a party of 120 emigrants, suspected of hostility toward the church, was
murdered in southeastern Utah by Paiute Indians and a band of Mormons led by
John D. Lee, who claimed to be acting on orders from Young himself.
Despite this atrocity, by 1858 Brigham Young had reached a reconciliation with
the federal government, which issued a pardon for alleged Mormon offenses and
for a time at least allowed the Saints to practice their religion and build
their community without interference.
Over the next decade, Young saw his people flourish. The Mormons' missionary
activities continued to be enormously fruitful, and Utah's economy and
population bloomed. In 1869, the completion of the transcontinental railroad at
Promontory Point, Utah, posed a challenge to this prosperity by bringing a
fresh influx of non-Mormons into the territory, but Young met the challenge by
consolidating the Mormons' political and economic power. He created a network of
church-financed cooperative stores that effectively shut out competition from
non-Mormon merchants, and he encouraged industrial cooperatives that aimed to
shut out non-Mormon investors. At the same time he secured passage of women's
suffrage in Utah, thereby increasing the number of Mormon voters and diluting
the political influence of non-Mormons whom the railroad brought into his
domain.
By the decade's end, however, federal
officials were resuming their efforts to separate church and state in Utah, and
the public was resuming its outcry against the Mormon practice of plural
marriage. In 1871, Brigham Young was himself tried under an 1862 law that
prohibited polygamy in United States territories, but though he had by this time
married more than twenty wives, he was not convicted. Federal officials also
sought to prove Young's complicity in the Mountain Meadows Massacre twenty years
after the fact by bringing John D. Lee to trial in 1877 , but Lee refused to
implicate the Mormon leader. Young responded to this fresh attack by federal
prosecutors by tacitly influencing Lee's Mormon jury to vote his acquittal, but
when public outrage over this outcome forced a second trial, Young saw he would
have to sacrifice Lee for the good of the church and accepted the verdict that
finally condemned Lee to death.
Brigham Young died shortly after the Lee trial, on August 29, 1877. For more
than a decade after his death, the Mormons would find themselves under
relentless attack by a federal government determined to strip away the economic
and political powers Young had established for their church, and determined to
eradicate the practice of plural marriage, a practice Young had hoped to
safeguard by maintaining a sanctuary of isolation between his church and the
outside world. Nonetheless, even after the government succeeded in its aims, the
Mormon Church and the Mormon community remained a living testimony to the vision
and spirit of Brigham Young. -- Text Courtesy of
1996THE
WEST FILM PROJECT and PBS
Brigham
Young - Prophet, Statesman, Pioneer
Brigham Young Prophet, Statesman, Pioneer. The second president of The Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Unidentified Author (1968). ...
THE TEACHINGS OF
BRIGHAM YOUNG
... All that Brigham Young prophesies is true Brother Heber has been
prophesying. You
know that I call him my Prophet, and he prophesies for me. And now I prophesy
...
LDSCN - The LDS Daily
WOOL ArchiveŠ - Brigham Young
... and in addition to this I know by the inspiration of God to me that Brigham
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... By Harold Schindler THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE. As governor of Utah Territory in
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... OF THE UNITED STATES. Your petitioners would respectfully represent: that
Whereas
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People
... Colonizer, territorial governor, and second President of the Church of Jesus
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... 1851, while Gunnison was writing his book, a controversy arose between
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... 1877 August 29, One time Territorial Governor, Brigham Young dies in his
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1910 article
from "New New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia"
... Utah War," or " Buchanan's blunder." Alfred Cummings, who had
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to succeed Brigham Young, came with the army. When the Latter-day Saints ...
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