Under the Banner of Heaven (27 page)

Following Samuel Smith’s suspect death, Sidney Rigdon—another anti-polygamist—launched a frantic last-ditch effort to grab Joseph’s mantle before Brigham and the other apostles arrived back in Nauvoo. Hurriedly securing the support of others in the anti-polygamy faction, he successfully maneuvered to have himself appointed “guardian” of the church, although the appointment wouldn’t be official until it could be confirmed by a vote at a special churchwide gathering scheduled for August 8. It appeared to be a fait accompli—until Brigham Young and the rest of the apostles suddenly showed up on the night of August 6, just in time to put the brakes on the anti-polygamists’ scheme to install Rigdon as Joseph’s replacement.

On the morning of August 8, 1844, the faithful of Nauvoo assembled to hear Rigdon and Young each explain why he should be the new Mormon leader. Rigdon argued his case for ninety minutes, with passion, but failed to persuade his fellow Saints that he was God’s clear choice for the job. Then it was Brigham’s turn to address the crowd, and an astonishing thing was said to have occurred, leaving no doubt about who would be the next prophet.

“Brigham Young arose and roared like a young lion,” recalled John D. Lee, “imitating the style and voice of Joseph, the Prophet. Many of the brethren declared that they saw the mantle of Joseph fall upon him. I myself, at the time, imagined that I saw and heard a strong resemblance to the Prophet in him, and felt that he was the man to lead us.” Numerous Saints who witnessed Brigham’s address (and even greater numbers who didn’t) swore that he underwent an incredible transfiguration as he spoke, temporarily assuming the voice, the appearance, and even the physical stature of Joseph, who was a considerably taller man. After such a performance, Brigham had no trouble convincing most of those present that he should be their next leader, and thus did he become the Mormons’ second president, prophet, seer, and revelator.

It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened had Brigham’s return to Nauvoo been delayed thirty-six hours, which might have allowed Rigdon to commandeer the helm of the church. One can safely assume that Mormon culture (to say nothing of the culture of the American West) would be vastly different today. In all likelihood the Mormons would never have settled the Great Basin, and LDS polygamy would have died in the cradle. As Rigdon’s own son John observed, the Latter-day Saints “made no mistake in placing Brigham Young at the head of the church… If Sidney Rigdon had been chosen to take that position the church would have tottered and fallen.”

Like Joseph Smith, Brigham Young had been born poor in rural New England, where the brouhaha of the Second Great Awakening made a lasting imprint on his consciousness. He was baptized into the Mormon Church in 1832, at the age of thirty-one, and quickly became one of Joseph’s most loyal lieutenants.

Brigham’s devotion to the founding prophet was deep and unswerving. He believed wholeheartedly in even Joseph’s most extreme theological tenets—he may well have believed in them with greater conviction than Joseph himself did. Brigham was, however, Joseph’s opposite in almost every imaginable way.

Joseph was tall, athletic, and handsome; Brigham was short and thick (at his heaviest, he weighed more than 250 pounds), with small, porcine eyes. Joseph was emotional, charismatic, an impulsive dreamer and incorrigible charmer; Brigham was steady, dependable, and pragmatic to a fault, a brilliant organizer who thought things through and paid attention to the details. Joseph craved the adoration of his followers; Brigham didn’t ask the Saints to love him—he demanded only their respect and unconditional obedience. Joseph conversed constantly with God, and in his lifetime received 135 revelations that were canonized in
The Doctrine and Covenants,
as well as many dozens more that were never published; Brigham had only a single canonized revelation,
D&C
136, which, characteristically, had nothing to do with sacred mysteries: it simply specified how the Mormons should organize their wagon trains for their migration to Utah.

To be sure, nobody ever called Brigham a religious genius, but when the Mormons faced imminent extermination in the wake of Joseph’s martyrdom, religious genius wasn’t what they needed. Instead, they required discipline and firm, decisive leadership, which is what Brigham ably provided. George Bernard Shaw praised him as “the American Moses.” He was the right man at the right time.

In May 1845, nine men were indicted for the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, seven of whom were brought to trial in Carthage. Among the defendants in
People v. Levi Williams,
as the case was designated, were some of western Illinois’s leading personages, including a colonel, a major, and two captains in the Carthage Greys; an Illinois state senator; and the editor of the Warsaw newspaper. Given the virulent anti-Mormon feelings throughout Hancock County, bringing the guilty to justice wasn’t going to be easy. Adding to the likelihood that no convictions would be forthcoming, both John Taylor and Willard Richards—the Mormon apostles who’d witnessed the murders—announced that they refused to appear in court, fearing (with good reason) that if they came anywhere near Carthage, they would immediately be killed.

The trial was held, regardless. On May 30, to nobody’s astonishment, all nine defendants were found not guilty. Although the Mormons expected this verdict, they were nevertheless infuriated by it. An editorial in the Nauvoo paper declared, “The murderers can rest assured that their case, independent of earthly tribunals, will be tried by the Supreme Judge of the universe, who has said vengeance is mine and I will repay.”

A month later, on the first anniversary of Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham spoke bitterly of the trial verdict and proclaimed that “it belongs to God and his people to avenge the blood [of His} servants.” Toward this end, he instructed church authorities to issue a formal “Oath of Vengeance,” which was immediately made part of the temple endowment ceremony, one of the church’s most sacred rituals.

The oath required Mormons to pledge, “I will pray, and never cease to pray, and never cease to importune high heaven to avenge the blood of the Prophets on this nation, and I will teach this to my children, and my children’s children unto the third and fourth generations.” This solemn vow to take vengeance was recited by every Latter-day Saint who participated in the standard temple ritual until it was removed from the endowment ceremony in 1927, after the oath was leaked to the non-Mormon press, sparking an outcry from politicians and the Gentile public that it was treasonous.

In the months following Joseph’s murder, most residents of Nauvoo didn’t need any prodding to seek revenge against Gentiles. Ever since the assassination, non-Mormons had stepped up their violent campaign to drive the Saints from Hancock County. Emboldened by the acquittal of Joseph’s killers, throughout the summer of 1845 anti-Mormon vigilantes led by Levi Williams (the primary defendant in the murder trial) roamed the county setting fire to Mormon homes and farms. By September 15, 1845, forty-four Mormon residences had been burned to the ground.

On September 16, Porter Rockwell was on his way to help a Mormon family salvage possessions from the ruins of one such incinerated home when he chanced upon Lieutenant Frank Worrell of the Carthage Greys—the same man who had been in charge of guarding the jail on the evening Joseph was murdered. Worrell had commanded the militiamen who’d conspired to fire blank cartridges at the approaching mob and had then stepped aside so the vigilantes could assassinate the prophet without impediment. When Rockwell encountered Worrell on that September afternoon, the latter was on horseback, chasing a local sheriff who’d had the temerity to express sympathy for the Mormons. As Worrell galloped after the terrified sheriff, Rockwell fired a rifle ball into Worrell’s gut. The victim “jumped four feet in the air,” said a witness to the shooting, “and rolled away from his horse dead.”

The killing of Worrell significantly worsened relations between the Saints and their adversaries. A few days later, a band of Mormons captured a youthful Gentile man named McBracking, whom they suspected of burning Mormon homes. McBracking begged for his life, but the Saints weren’t in a forgiving mood. They castrated him, cut his throat, sliced off one of his ears, and shot him two or three times. As Joseph had preached three years earlier, some sins were so heinous that the only way the guilty party could atone for them was to “spill his blood upon the ground, and let the smoke thereof ascend up to God.”

By now passions were at flash point on both sides of the conflict. Posses of enraged Mormons and Gentiles ranged back and forth across the county in a rampage of arson and plunder, burning more than two hundred homes. Worried that Hancock County was again on the brink of full-blown civil war, Governor Thomas Ford dispatched four hundred troops to Nauvoo, along with a committee of respected dignitaries (including renowned statesman Stephen A. Douglas) who were implored to negotiate a lasting solution to the hostilities.

It had become clear to Brigham that there was no future for the Saints anywhere near Hancock County. On September 24 he sent a letter to Governor Ford’s blue-ribbon committee saying that in return for a cease-fire from the Gentiles, the Mormons would promise to vacate not only Illinois but the whole of the United States: they would depart the following spring, as soon as the prairie grass along their intended route west was high enough to provide forage for their beasts of burden. The Gentiles agreed to the deal on the first of October, giving the Saints a window of relative peace in which to build wagons and stockpile supplies in preparation for their mass evacuation.

For the Saints’ next homeland, Brigham Young wanted to find a place that was both a long way from civilization and would seem repugnant to Gentile settlers, so that his people might live free from persecution. After considering Oregon, California, and Canada’s Vancouver Island, he and his counselors decided the Saints would make their final stand amid the sparsely inhabited deserts of the Great Basin, which at the time belonged to Mexico.

The Saints didn’t intend to abandon the City of Joseph until the weather warmed, but when news arrived that a warrant had been issued for Brigham’s arrest on charges of harboring counterfeiters, an earlier departure suddenly seemed like a good idea.* On February 4,1846, the first platoon of Mormon emigrants boarded flatboats at the Nauvoo dock, rowed west across the dark, near-freezing waters of the Mississippi River, and clambered uncertainly onto the Iowa shore, which was still in the iron grip of winter. The great exodus was launched.

* Nauvoo had long been a notorious haven for printers of bogus money, thanks to a highly unusual provision in the city charter granting the town leaders extraordinary powers of habeas corpus. This much-abused clause permitted Brigham, and Joseph before him, to provide legal immunity to individuals charged with crimes beyond the city limits. And like the residents of present-day Colorado City who see nothing wrong with “bleeding the beast” by committing welfare fraud, neither Brigham nor Joseph believed that the counterfeiters in their midst were criminals in the eyes of the Lord; they were, to the contrary, helping advance the Kingdom of God every time they bilked a Gentile with their fraudulent greenbacks, and thus deserved to be protected from arrest.

Disillusioned by Joseph’s murder, as well as by disturbing rumors of clandestine debaucheries practiced by their leaders, hundreds of Mormons had split away from the church in the preceding months.* But the overwhelming majority loaded up whatever possessions would fit into their wagons, abandoned the rest to their enemies, and followed Brigham into the wilderness. By May of that year more than six thousand Saints were plodding westward through the axle-deep spring mud, drawn by the promise of Zion.

* After Sidney Rigdon’s ambition to replace Joseph Smith was quashed by Brigham Young’s ascendancy, Rigdon and a few hundred followers established a church of their own in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but it quickly dwindled to nothing. Apostle Lyman Wright broke away with numerous unhappy Mormons to form another short-lived church in Texas. And a charismatic charlatan and onetime Baptist named James Jesse Strang drew seven hundred disenchanted Saints away from Brigham’s church—including Joseph’s mother, his lone surviving brother, two of his sisters, and Martin Harris, the man who’d mortgaged his farm to pay for publication of
The Book of Mormon.
Strang attracted this following by pronouncing that an angel had visited him at the exact moment of the prophet’s murder and anointed him Joseph’s successor. Fifteen months later, Strang claimed to have discovered an ancient text titled the
Book of the Law of the Lord,
inscribed on a set of brass folios he called the Plates of Laban, which he found near Voree, Wisconsin, buried on a hillside; according to Strang, this document had originally been part of the set of gold plates unearthed by Joseph in 1827 that yielded
The Book of Mormon.
Impressed by these plates, the “Strangites” joined their prophet in establishing a colony on Beaver Island, off the northwest coast of Michigan’s lower peninsula, where Strang had himself crowned “King James I of the Kingdom of God on Earth,” began taking plural wives, and ruled with absolute power. It was to be a brief reign, however: in 1856 a gang of disgruntled Beaver Island denizens ambushed King James and fatally shot him. Even before Strang’s murder, moreover, several prominent Strangites who objected to the king’s polygamous proclivities broke away to form the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Joseph’s widow, Emma Smith, joined these “Reorganites,” and her son Joseph III became the group’s president and prophet. Today this church—now called the Community of Christ and headquartered in Independence, Missouri, in a striking $60 million temple designed by Gyo Obata—has 250,000 members, making it by far the largest of the Mormon spin-off sects.

The thirteen-hundred-mile emigration from Nauvoo was a grueling trial. On the journey west they were plagued with frostbite, diphtheria, scurvy, starvation, stillborn babies, tick fever, hostile Gentiles, and an epidemic of whooping cough that killed dozens of young children. More than six hundred Saints perished during that first grim winter. But Brigham proved to be a masterful manager of men, and he possessed a formidable will. On July 21, 1847, an advance party crested a ridge and caught the Saints’ first glimpse of “the valley where the broad waters of the Great Salt Lake glistened in the sunbeams.” The next morning this group, with scout Porter Rockwell leading the way, descended the western slope of the Wasatch down what is now called Emigration Canyon. At its mouth they emerged into the Saints’ new Zion, near the southern end of the vast body of water they had spied earlier that day—a lake with no outlet, and saltier than the Pacific Ocean.