Brigham Young

Sovereign in America

David Vaughn Mason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135012441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia delle religioni

Brigham Young was one of the most influential—and controversial—Mormon leaders in American history. An early follower of the new religion, he led the cross-continental migration of the Mormon people from Illinois to Utah, where he built a vast religious empire that was both revolutionary and authoritarian, radically different from yet informed by the existing culture of the U.S. With his powerful personality and sometimes paradoxical convictions, Young left an enduring stamp on both his church and the region, and his legacy remains active today.

In a lively, concise narrative bolstered by primary documents, and supplemented by a robust companion website, David Mason tells the dynamic story of Brigham Young, and in the process, illuminates the history of the LDS Church, religion in America, and the development of the American west. This book will be a vital resource for anyone seeking to understand the complex, uniquely American origins of a church that now counts over 15 million members worldwide.

Part I
BRIGHAM YOUNG

Chapter 1
OUT OF OBSCURITY

On June 1, 1801, Brigham Young—the American Moses, the Lion of the Lord, the treasonous reprobate and scourge of American democracy—was born into wretched, rootless poverty in primitive New England, in a windy shack. The ninth child of paupers pressed down to a barren servitude by their own incompetence and by a gentry loath to raise rivals. He spent the next seventy-six years justifying his existence.

The country that had just manufactured Europe’s unrealized dream of a bourgeois democracy was cutting its way into unsettled valleys, pushing its own post-revolution ethos inland, laying down, in America’s thick, deciduous forests, gaunt communities that knew no authority. As the country came out of the Revolution that had directed its faculties to the common task of dismissing foreign domination of its imagination, its utopian dreams turned in every direction. Every year, every settlement, in this period reinvented the American way of life as the means, finally, of ending reinvention and resting in the culmination of history. The audacious, puritan spirit that imagined itself free of kings and colonies, planted God in the towns that split the American wilderness, and, while proclaiming the land a New Jerusalem, nevertheless hoarded with biblical jealousy the ways of ignoring the national hegemony implied by the roads that joined together the pockets of faithful rebels. With their rejection of distant, aristocratic rule, the American patriots embedded suspicion of despotic, authoritarian power in the national culture and made position and place available to those who had know-how or the anointing of God, whatever their heritage, education, or title. It was the most imaginative period of American history, a time when churches shamelessly ruled American towns and radical Christians railed against clergymen as oppressors of the poor, whole districts looked for Jesus to descend in a cloud, mad individuals saw angels and devils and unseen worlds opened up for good and ill, and squatters rejected federal authority in the name of God while American soldiers marched on Tripoli. The very structures of society “were undergoing a democratic winnowing.”¹

The newly empowered even dared look past the horizon of traditional propriety. By the first year of the nineteenth century, the Shakers, following after the calling of a blacksmith’s daughter, had already set themselves apart from the mainstream of American culture by adopting celibate communal living in several settlements around New England. Teaching school in New Hampshire at this moment was Jacob Cochran, whose followers would soon form a religious community that valorized radical forms of marriage, including polygamy and polyandry. The fecundity of the American religious imagination in the early 1800s, and the new country’s peculiar talent for sustaining the aggressively novel visions of iconoclasts would in the next few decades bear the Oneida Community, the Seventh-day Adventists, Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a bevy of other lesser-known groups equally determined to do American religion—American life—differently than it had been done.

This America that Brigham knew from his very first days anticipated him. A cauldron of contradictions, a land that hated and loved authority, ran from religion to go to church, hid away from society to civilize the wilderness, and hoarded money while rejecting wealth. It was Victorian in its public prudishness but as libertine as it was able. A country that despised erudition as a block to the pursuit of knowledge and dotted its landscape with colleges. A country that cited liberty to justify slavery. This turn-ofthe-century experiment embedded its paradoxes in its children, and this one child, at least, lived to realize them all. A man of stern, puritanical disposition, Brigham eschewed drinking and playing cards, but danced and sang, and put his own daughters on the stage. He preached unmistakably Victorian morals and claimed more than fifty women as wives. He reviled the U.S. government and promoted the U.S. Constitution as divinely inspired. He fiercely defended his own independence and exercised autocratic authority over the church he controlled. He belittled higher learning and sent his sons to West Point and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He openly decried the capitalist corruption of the United States, promoted communal economics in the Utah Territory, and became, perhaps, the wealthiest man west of the Mississippi. Rejecting the establishment of the United States as forcefully as it rejected him, Brigham pursued a distinctly American dream only as the American spirit inspired him and as the American frontier made the pursuit possible. The consequence for history is that this shoeless bumpkin who created an empire is paradigmatically American. Indeed, Brigham is among the most American Americans the continent has known, in spite of—or, even, because of—how earnestly his country has tried to disown him.

Brigham’s grandfather, Joseph, Sr., squandered the family fortune in drink and poor decisions and then died, leaving his widow and ten children to bear the responsibility, which is what indentured Brigham’s father, John, at ten years old in 1773, to Colonel John Jones, a respectable landowner in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Jones and his wife beat the boy until he ran away to join the Revolution at sixteen to escape the violence. Enlisted first in George Washington’s 4th Massachusetts Brigade, he marched, was discharged, and reenlisted twice more without firing a shot. Finally, he returned to Hopkinton and to Colonel Jones, a couple of years older and a victor of his own revolution. At least, he set up with Jones this time as an employee, rather than as a servant, though the Colonel did take Young’s enlistment papers to Boston to pay his own taxes.²

John Young met Abigail Howe in Hopkinton. Her parents, of course, objected. Veteran of the Revolution he may have been, but John was, even so, the destitute offspring of a drunkard, raised alongside Negro servants. Nevertheless, John and eighteen-year-old “Nabby” married in 1785. Perhaps to make the union more palatable to her parents, John and Nabby chose a respectable Congregationalist church—one of the mainstream denominations in New England—for the ceremony. Their daughter Nancy was born the next year, and Fanny the year after that, while John ground out a living on a Hopkinton tenant farm that wore him down and barely sustained them.

After little more than two years, the moves began. First to Durham, New York, on the eastern side of the Catskill Mountains, then back to Hopkinton, then, over the next five decades, to Vermont, to several settlements in New York, to Ohio, to Missouri, and to Illinois. From the beginning of his married life, John, like many of his peers in the broad class of the unestablished, was driven to the moving frontier of American civilization, hoping with each relocation to come to rest in a land of profitable promise. An impatient migration away from civilization saw less than half a million people living in the regions beyond the Appalachians turn into more than two million between 1801 and 1820.³ The hopeful settler population expanded to fill great pockets of land made available under various land-grant schemes. Each failure was followed by a new premise elsewhere, and uprooted were the family, belongings in boxes and barrels and on the wagon. The culture of American settlement expressed little regret for left property and little longing for the “time when.” Movement was merely the conduct of life. Certainly, John Young had little reason to look back on his early years as a secure comfort lost to adulthood.⁴ As for the others who filled the ever-westward valleys and fields of New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, comfort and security were ever only ahead. The Young family’s wandering—which became increasingly nomadic after Brigham was born—made moving (as opposed to settling) the way people made good, and always westward toward the opportunities available in yet unsettled quarters.

Shortly after their third child, Rhoda, was born in 1789, John and Abigail moved back to Hopkinton, where they managed to remain for ten years, and where they added five more children to their family: John Jr., Nabby (named for her mother), Susannah, Joseph, and Phinehas. For a decade in Hopkinton, they were close to Abigail’s parents, who had not warmed to their daughter’s union with a vagabond like John Young. For whatever reason, Rhoda stayed behind with Abigail’s parents in 1801, while the rest of the family loaded a January sleigh to make the hundred-mile trip to the fifty acres in Whitingham, Vermont, that John had purchased from his brother-in-law for fifty dollars. Because Abigail was four months’ pregnant with her ninth child, the journey through snow and worse-than-freezing temperatures would have been grueling. But never mind that. Vermont was the future. Vermont was salvation. Who would wait for the snows to melt to claim their place at the table?⁵ In the haunt of the woods and the fury of the snow, John threw logs atop each other, and his family held themselves against the winter. This, then, was the ragged shack into which, when June beat away the cold with its own type of suffering, came the baby who would make the American West.

As they moved closer to the edge, the Youngs set aside the respectability of Congregationalism for Methodism. By the turn of the century, Methodism was a radical choice in a rather full marketplace of denominations. John and Nabby aligned themselves with a movement that valued spiritual gifts and miracles over seminary education, with people who had wrung the heavens out of the Second Great Awakening. John and Nabby heard a distinctly American Christianity from Methodist and “New Light” Baptist preachers, who conditioned election on an individual’s faith and obedience, who tried to derive theology from a literal reading of the Bible, and who affirmed the freedom of the will in a peculiarly American way by leaving matters that the Bible did not explicitly address to the individual consciences of the faithful. The statement of faith composed by one of the Whitingham congregations beside which the Youngs lived after 1801 included the following democratic declaration: “I believe in the right and duty of exercising our own judgment in the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.”⁶ So endeared were they to Methodism that Brigham’s parents named their last child—their eleventh—Lorenzo Dow Young, after the distinctly wild, Methodist circuit rider.

By the time Brigham was born, his mother and his older sister Nabby had both contracted tuberculosis. Bearing a ninth child worsened his mother’s condition to the extent that she was mostly incapacitated during his infancy, and fourteen-year-old Fanny took charge of him. His mother’s illness was not the only complication in the life to which Brigham was born. His father’s latest plot was rugged, steep, and tree-covered—ill-suited to farming, or at least, available only to back-breaking labor. John not only exhausted himself in the attempt to make his own land arable, he spent whatever time he could spare clearing neighboring plots for much-needed cash. The hard ground on which they had landed forced the family to pursue every means of acquiring the necessities of life. Like his father, ten-year-old John Jr. hired out to fell trees and raise fences on other farms, and the older girls learned to weave baskets and hats to sell in town. Before long, John Young recognized his family’s situation as untenable. Deeding his land back to his brother-in-law early in 1804, John took up with another westward movement and carted his wife and remaining children nearly two hundred miles out of Vermont and across New York to Sherburne, an area even more rustic than Whitingham but with land more amenable to John’s developing competence as a farmer.

Brigham’s childhood developed on shifting ground around New York, where he saw death and birth up close. In 1804, Brigham’s younger sister Louisa was born, and, shortly after the family settled in Cold Brook in 1807, Lorenzo Dow was born. In the meantime, Brigham’s older sister Nabby died of the tuberculosis that was still threatening to overwhelm Abigail. Rhoda rejoined the family, happily, in 1809. When she and John Jr. both married in 1813, the Youngs took up stakes again to follow Rhoda and her Methodist preacher husband, John P. Greene, to Aurelius, New York. Two years later, Abigail died. Fanny left her husband and returned to the family, restoring something of a motherly presence to the house, but the loss was great for fourteen-year-old Brigham, who later said of his mother, “no better woman ever lived in the world.”⁷ Brigham was left wit...