Brigham Young

John G. Turner

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674071797
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Brigham Young was a rough-hewn craftsman from New York whose impoverished and obscure life was electrified by the Mormon faith. He trudged around the United States and England to gain converts for Mormonism, spoke in spiritual tongues, married more than fifty women, and eventually transformed a barren desert into his vision of the Kingdom of God. While previous accounts of his life have been distorted by hagiography or polemical exposé, John Turner provides a fully realized portrait of a colossal figure in American religion, politics, and westward expansion.After the 1844 murder of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Young gathered those Latter-day Saints who would follow him and led them over the Rocky Mountains. In Utah, he styled himself after the patriarchs, judges, and prophets of ancient Israel. As charismatic as he was autocratic, he was viewed by his followers as an indispensable protector and by his opponents as a theocratic, treasonous heretic.Under his fiery tutelage, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints defended plural marriage, restricted the place of African Americans within the church, fought the U.S. Army in 1857, and obstructed federal efforts to prosecute perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. At the same time, Young's tenacity and faith brought tens of thousands of Mormons to the American West, imbued their everyday lives with sacred purpose, and sustained his church against adversity. Turner reveals the complexity of this spiritual prophet, whose commitment made a deep imprint on his church and the American Mountain West.

CHAPTER ONE

A New Creature

He [Joseph Smith] believed that among all the Churches in the world the Methodist was the nearest right.

—PETER CARTWRIGHT

“I was baptized under the hand of Ebezer [Eleazar] Miller,” scrawled Brigham Young in his diary when he joined Joseph Smith Jr.’s Church of Christ on April 9, 1832. Miller baptized Young on a cold, snowy day in Mendon, New York, about twenty miles south of Rochester. After the two-mile trip from the stream back to his Mendon home, Young wrote many years later, “he [Miller] laid his hands on me and ordained me an elder, at which I marvelled.”¹

For Brigham Young, his conversion, baptism, and ordination heralded a new beginning, a rupture from his previous life as a rural New York craftsman struggling to reverse his parents’ downward mobility.² Young’s paternal grandfather, Joseph Young, was a Hopkinton, Massachusetts, physician and surgeon who served in the French and Indian War and was killed when a fence pole fell on him in 1769. Joseph Young had already fashioned misery for his family through heavy drinking and gambling, which spoiled a promising opportunity to climb into prosperity and left his wife, Elizabeth, and his children in poverty and distress. “As soon as the sleeping dust of her husband was [de]cently committed to the grave,” Brigham’s sister Fanny later wrote, “evry man to whom he ow’d a Dollar was on the wing.” Elizabeth Young sold her Hopkinton farm and bound out two of her sons, Joseph Jr. and Brigham’s father, John, then ages four and six. They served Colonel John Jones, who owned an estate and gristmill in nearby Ashland. It was hard work, as the region was “a country broken and rocky, one with rich enough soil, well watered, but one to tax the capabilities of every farmer.” Brigham’s father, whom Jones’s wife often threatened with severe floggings, escaped further torment by joining the Continental Army at age seventeen. After several short enlistments, John Young returned and, without better prospects, resumed work with Colonel Jones, this time for wages.³

Early life

Given his low economic station, John Young formed an advantageous union by marrying Abigail (Nabby) Howe in October 1785. According to Fanny Young, Nabby married John “sorely against the will of her parents, particularly her Father, for he though[t] it rather beneath him, that his daughter should choose a servant boy, brought up in the kitchen with black, as well as [white ser]vants.” Sometime after the birth of their second daughter in 1787, John Young moved his family to the frontier, settling on land southwest of Albany in present-day Durham. Several Hopkinton families had recently moved to the area. John Young undertook the move in a bid for independence and prosperity, as it was unlikely he would ever acquire property in Hopkinton. By 1790, however, the Youngs were back in Massachusetts. Phineas Howe resolved to reclaim his daughter and grandchildren from the wilderness and ordered two sleighs west to return them to Massachusetts. John knew that Nabby’s father “had always disliked him,” Fanny Young wrote, “and he [John] could not feel willing to place himself under his immediate inspection.” Given Nabby’s desire for home, however, John relented, suppressed his pride, moved his family into a house on Phineas Howe’s land, “and raised corn on shares.”⁴

After ten years and the birth of five additional children, John Young pursued a second attempt at independence. From a wealthy brother-in-law he purchased fifty acres of land in Whitingham, Vermont, nestled among the Green Mountains and close to the Massachusetts border. As he struggled to clear the rocky land on his new farm, Nabby bore their fourth son, Brigham, on June 1, 1801. Although she continued to bear children, Brigham’s mother at this point was suffering from consumption. Brigham’s sister Fanny bottle-fed him in his infancy.⁵

John Young never turned his Whitingham land into a profitable or even self-sustaining enterprise. Instead, he hired out his labor helping other freeholders clear their properties of trees, stumps, and rocks. He also turned to other meager sources of income: one Whitingham publication later identified him as a “poor basket maker.” In 1804, the Youngs joined a Yankee exodus known as “York Fever,” in which thousands of New Englanders left unprofitable farms in Vermont and western Massachusetts for cheap land and a renewed hope of prosperity. At the peak of this migration, hundreds of sleighs glided through wintry Albany each day on their way to points west. Brigham’s father relocated his family to Sherburne (Smyrna, after a division of the township), in Chenango County, New York, about one hundred miles west of Albany.⁶

Now forty years of age, John Young once again plunged into the rigors of building a home, clearing land, and planting crops. Despite his exertions, he never became a successful frontier farmer. The Youngs occasionally went hungry and could rarely provide their children with adequate clothing, let alone anything resembling a formal education. “In my youthful days,” Brigham later reminisced, “instead of going to school, I had to chop logs, to sow and plant, to plow in the midst of roots barefooted, and if I had on a pair of pants that would cover me I did pretty well.” Brigham and his siblings learned to provide for themselves. “My sisters would make me what was called a Jo. Johnson cap for winter,” he recalled, “and in summer I wore a straw hat which I frequently braided for myself.” Brigham had ten siblings. His sister Nabby died shortly after their move to Smyrna, but his four brothers and five other sisters lived into adulthood. Even as the elder daughters married and left the household, John and Nabby Young never earned or grew enough to provide more than a hardscrabble life.⁷

Most of Brigham’s ancestors were Congregationalists, the spiritual descendants of the New England Puritans. Among his ancestors were both evangelical New Lights, who had supported the revivals that became known as the Great Awakening, and antirevivalist Old Lights. Nabby’s maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Goddard, heard “that dear servant of God, Mr. [George] Whitefield,” preach in Framingham and signed a New Light petition against the town’s established minister. Family lore included a “marvelous” series of events involving Ebenezer Goddard, who became involved in a conflict with Nat Smith, a wealthy and reclusive neighbor. A widow had asked Goddard to administer her estate, which lay on the outskirts of Smith’s property. When Goddard refused to cede control of the estate to Smith, “Old Nat” “told him he should rue the day.” Shortly thereafter, a servant mysteriously found in the well a set of Goddard’s papers that had been locked in his desk. Even more mysteriously, “not a paper was wet.” Then the family discovered that “something ailed the milk.” The Goddards blamed and flogged a young black servant boy and tied him in a corner. Inexplicable incidents, however, continued. Ebenezer’s wife Sybil saw her fine cap suddenly appear, “and before she could possibly get hold of it, she saw one half of it go up [the] chimney, while she caught the other half in her hand.” While heating the oven, the family also found a set of books and, later, infant clothing among the flames. At that point, the Goddards dedicated themselves to fasting and prayer and recruited a coterie of local ministers to augment their supplications. Finally, after three days, “there seemed to be a shock through the whole house, not a distress or sorrow, but of joy and assurance that there was a God in the heavens,” and from that moment forward the curse was lifted. The family thereafter believed both in the devil’s “power on the earth” and in the presence of angels. Their daughter Susannah—Nabby’s mother—“believed that Jacob’s ladder was not yet broken and that angels still continued to ascend and descend [between heaven and earth].” Brigham’s Goddard and Howe relatives bequeathed to their descendants a robust belief in supernatural phenomena.⁸

When the Youngs moved to Vermont in 1801, they entered a region in which a welter of Christian sects had taken root, including Baptists, Universalists, Methodists, and Shakers. According to one local history, the residents of Whitingham circulated tales of witchcraft and housed a smattering of treasure seekers led by Silas Hamilton, a prominent citizen who used a divining rod to direct digging efforts. Rather than joining in treasure-seeking quests, however, the Young family inclined toward backcountry evangelicalism. John Young had married Nabby in Hopkinton’s Congregationalist church, but at some point during the first few years of the new century they became Methodists. The Youngs joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, an American denomination that had emerged from the Anglican reform movement begun in the late 1730s by John Wesley. Despite resistance from Congregationalists and Presbyterians as well as competition from a host of other Protestant sectaries, Methodism spread rapidly in the new settlements of western New York, including Chenango County. “Not infrequently,” chronicled William Warren Sweet in his history of American frontier religion, “a Methodist circuit-rider called at the cabin of a settler before the mud in his stick chimney was dry or before the weight poles were on the roof.” There was no Methodist church building in Smyrna, but Methodist itinerants regularly passed through on their circuits. “There is nothing out today but crows and Methodist preachers,” went a nineteenth-century proverb about inclement weather.⁹

In October 1807, Nabby Young gave birth to her last child, a son the couple named after Lorenzo Dow, the Methodist itinerant whom the family had probably seen and heard at a nearby camp meeting. “Crazy Dow,” whose “words . . . cut like a sword,” according to an early Methodist circuit rider, operated on the margins of Episcopal Methodism in the early 1800s. “He was as odd-looking as his acts,” Brigham later recalled. Unshaven and often unwashed with unkempt hair hanging over his shoulders, the purposefully eccentric Dow ruined horses barnstorming around the frontier in a furious effort to save souls, oppose Congregational establishments, and mock his theological opponents. “You can and you can’t,” he derided Calvinists in an oft-quoted saying. “You shall and you shan’t; you will and you won’t—And you’ll be damned if you do, and you’ll be damned if you don’t.” Ordained in 1799 as a Methodist itinerant, Dow left his circuit to undertake a preaching tour in Ireland and thereafter operated outside the official confines of the denomination. A relentless opponent of Calvinism, Dow insisted that grace and salvation were freely available to all people through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, and he referred to his multitudes of converts as his “spiritual children.” Nabby and John Young’s choice of names for their last child was not unusual; parents often bestowed the name of a famous preacher on their son, and Dow’s fame was without parallel in the first few decades of the nineteenth century.¹⁰

Methodists were a tiny minority of Americans at the start of the nineteenth century, but by 1850 they claimed one-third of all American church members. Both Enlightenment-era skeptics and more rationally inclined members of the clergy hoped that “enthusiastic” forms of popular religion would wither away, but the American age of revolution instead galvanized a tidal wave of popular, enthusiastic evangelicalism. Part of this torrent, Methodism grew explosively for a number of reasons: its dedicated cadre of self-sacrificial itinerants, its organizational structure (including class meetings, quarterly meetings, and annual conferences), and its egalitarian embrace of vernacular culture. Methodist camp meetings became famous —infamous, to their critics—for singing, shouting, collapsing, and other wild manifestations of spiritual power. In Hop Bottom, Pennsylvania, Methodists full of “holy zeal” turned their meetings into “scenes of confusion” when they exhibited the “jumping spirit.” “When much excited,” wrote George Peck, “they would commence moving up and down, apparently without effort or a knowledge of what they were doing.” Having heard reports of “a singularity called the jerks or jerking exercise,” Lorenzo Dow saw the soil plowed up at one camp meeting ground, where people “had jerked so powerfully that they had kicked up the earth as a horse stamping flies.” Especially in newly settled regions of the country, Methodists and other early nineteenth-century evangelicals also reported prophetic dreams, visions, miracles of all sorts, remarkable healings, and other phenomena. Dow claimed the God-given ability to tell fortunes and predict future calamities. Thus, the Young family embraced a rugged faith that emphasized direct encounters with God and ecstatic manifestations of the divine.¹¹

Although critics of the revivals described them as hotbeds of spiritual and moral disorder, devout Methodists emphasized a strict moral code. “When I was young,” Brigham described his childhood, “I was kept within very strict bounds, and was not allowed to walk more than half-an-hour on Sunday for exercise.” Methodists imposed a stringent moral code on their adherents, who typically were “middling people” eager for both eternal salvation and the earthly success they believed would come through discipline and morality. Methodist preachers denounced swearing, licentiousness, and idleness, and they promoted cleanliness and frugality. “The Methodists in that early day dressed plain,” wrote early itinerant Peter Cartwright, “wore no jewelry, no ruffles . . . They religiously kept the Sabbath day; many of them abstained from drinking.” Though such discipline never brought them any worldly prosperity, Brigham’s parents firmly embraced this evangelical moral code. John and Nabby Young forbade swearing, dancing, and music, and they insisted on a strict observance of the Sabbath. Brigham later suggested that his parents had deprived him even of wholesome pleasure. “I had not a chance to dance when I was young,” he noted regretfully, “and never heard the enchanting tones of the violin, until I was eleven years of age; and then I thought I was on the high way to hell, if I suffered myself to linger and listen to it.” His father did not hesitate to punish lapses in morality and upright behavior. “[I]t used to be a word and a blow, with him,” Brigham remarked of his father, “but the blow came first.” Alongside her husband’s evangelical discipline, Nabby Young nurtured her children in the “Bible-drenched” culture and prayerful piety of early 1800s America. His mother, Brigham recollected, “taught her children all the time to honour the name of the Father [and the] Son, and to reverence the holy book.” While restrained in discussions of his father, Brigham retained a fond memory of his mother’s saintliness.¹²

In 1813, the Youngs moved west, to the township of Genoa (possibly Lansingville), near the shores of Cayuga Lake, New York. Shortly after this move, in June 1815, Nabby Howe Young succumbed to her tuberculosis. The family dispersed, with several of the younger children going to live with older married siblings. John Young took several of his sons farther west, around the southern tips of Cayuga and Seneca Lakes to a farm in Tyrone, not far from Brigham’s sister Rhoda and her husband John P. Greene. These years after his mother’s death marked the trough of destitution and misery in Brigham’s childhood. Once again John Young and his sons cleared land—Brigham’s brother Joseph remembered “a wilderness country densly covered with heavy timbers”—and tapped sugar maples in the early spring, and they now lived without any female care or companionship. In early 1816, John Young took a large load of maple sugar to the nearby settlement of Painted Post, leaving Brigham and nine-year-old Lorenzo to gather and boil additional sap for several days. Nearly out of flour, the boys subsisted on a robin that Brigham shot until their father returned. Never able to earn enough by farming, John Young and his sons scoured the area for other opportunities to earn money: clearing land, harvesting crops, and bottoming chairs. Now without his mother, Brigham later recalled, “I learned to make bread, wash the dishes, milk the cows, and make butter.” After his mother’s death and amid his father’s absences, Brigham had no choice but to become a self-sufficient young man and at times a surrogate father to Lorenzo.¹³

This training for adulthood served him well, as Brigham soon found himself evicted from his father’s home. John Young remarried, to a widow named Hannah Brown. “When I was sixteen years old,” Brigham remembered, “my father said, ‘You can now have your time—go.’” Although Brigham apparently resented the abrupt nature of his departure, it was not unusual for young men to leave home at this age to learn skills and provide for themselves. Brigham moved back east near Auburn, New York, where he temporarily settled with relatives and looked for work. No longer the frontier, Auburn was a small boomtown in 1817, with a rapidly growing population and an assortment of mills, shops, and taverns. Brigham quickly began to evidence the industry and drive that characterized his adult life. “A year had not passed,” he later explained, “until I stopped running, jumping, wresting, [and] laying out my strength for anything useless.” He apprenticed himself to a furniture maker, who taught him to make bedsteads, washboards, benches, and chairs. Over the next few years, he helped build the Auburn Theological Seminary for the Presbyterian Church and worked on several of Auburn’s finest homes, including the future residence of William H. Seward, who later served as governor of New York and Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State. Developing a diverse array of skills during these years, Brigham later described himself as a “carpenter, joiner, painter, and glazier....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1. A New Creature
• 2. The Tongues of Angels
• 3. Acts of the Apostles
• 4. New and Everlasting Covenant
• 5. Prophets and Pretenders
• 6. Word and Will
• 7. A New Era of Things
• 8. One Family
• 9. Go Ahead
• 10. The Whirlwind
• 11. Let Him Alone
• 12. The Monster in the Vale
• 13. The Soul and Mainspring of the West
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index