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