Mormon History
Open Letter to Brigham Young #7 - 1871
Daily Corinne Reporter – September 30, 1871
HISTORY OF MORMONISM.
_______
(Written expressly
for the Corinne Reporter and containing a
true and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)
The Prophet's Sacred Person Guarded Night and Day -- His Abject Fear of Assassination. -- The Coward's Dread of His Own Shadow -- The Cost of His Protection -- Who Pays fot It -- The Cause of His Fear -- The Revelator's Guilty Conscience -- The Blood of a Hundred Murdered Innocents Before His Eyes. -- Etc.
Salt Lake City, Sept. 28, 1871.
An Open
Letter to Brigham Young.
SIR: The President of the United States travels without a bodyguard, and sleeps
without armed sentinels at his door. This is also true of the Governors of
States and of American citizens generally. There is not a bishop of any
religious body in our country that goes thus guarded. There has not been a
Governor of Utah, except yourself, that has about him, day and night, armed men
regularly employed and paid expressly for his personal protection. It is not
only a peculiarity, but one of the crowning glories of our republican government
that magistrates and rulers can go and come and freely mix with the populace
anywhere and at any time unattended, and without fear or danger of
assassination. President Lincoln was only a partial exception to this rule; for
he was not attended in such a manner when he was killed. But, sir, from the
beginning of your rule over us to the present time you have had your person
carefully and vigilantly guarded. This armed protection commenced in Nauvoo,
continued during your journey hither, and has been continued ever since without
any relaxation. This can be seen in the sentinel at your gate during the day, in
the armed patrol upon your premises at night, and in the escort which ever
attends you in your travels. All this costs valuable time and means. Allowing
two dollars per diem in ordinary times for the last twenty-four years; and in
the numerous times of excitement and imagined danger the increased expense of
special patrols has been at least equal to the former, so that it is not unfair
to say that you have cost the Mormons of this city fully two hundred thousand
dollars to guard you in your own house! If this statement should appear
extravagant to my brethren, they can make the calculation for themselves. Then,
how do you pay those guards? Out of the tithing? By no means, except in certain
cases. The onerous and exacting duty has mainly been performed by men obtained
by requisition on the bishops. These brethren, having toiled all day for the
support of themselves and families, have gone to your premises and stood guard
all night, with not an enemy within a thousand miles of Salt Lake City. The time
and tax upon the physical endurance of these guards were valuable and aggregate
an enormous sum. Then the princely escort which never fails to accompany you in
your frequent journeyings is ever quartered upon the people, and this has cost
us, first and last, time included, not less than two hundred thousand dollars.
That I consider a very moderate estimate. You can not better spend a day or two
than in making the calculation for yourself. The cost, then, of guarding your
person in Utah, has been fully four hundred thousand dollars in valuable time
and hard-earned means, less than twenty thousand of which has been paid out of
the tithing. I congratulate you, sir, that you are the only man in the United
States, outside or inside of a county jail or a State's prison, that has cost
the pockets, the time, the larders, the oat-bins, hay-stacks and chicken roosts
of American citizens such a sum for such a purpose! And all entirely uncalled
for, and without a reason or a necessity worthy of a moment's consideration. For
I do not believe there has ever been a time during the entire period of your
incumbency of the presidency of the church when you were in danger of being
assassinated.
The causes of your taking such extraordinary precautions for your personal
safety, lie in your Falstaffian nature -- your native cowardice, and the bloody
spectres which haunt you as the unwelcome "teasers" of a guilty conscience. From
the beginning you have been conscious of being a usurper and a traitor. It is
clear and undeniable that the constitution of our church (the Book of Covenants)
predicates the idea of "the succession" upon the well understood law of
primogeniture, stating expressly, that it "was confirmed to be handed down from
father to son," and that it should be in Joseph, "and in his seed through all
their generations" you fully recognized this proposition in the earlier years of
your presidency as applying to David Smith, because you knew the common sense of
the people would not admit of too abrupt a departure from the text of the Book
of Covenants, and the cherished traditions of the church, no man in Nauvoo, in
1844 knew better than yourself, who was the "hope and the expectation" of our
unsuspecting faith; and you manifest that conviction to-day in your traitorous
efforts to ostracise and repudiate the family of Joseph, and in your
overwhelming ambition to fix the next ensuing succession in your son, Brigham
Young, Jr. It was this consciousness of perpetrating a wrong and a treason upon
the children of Joseph, that excited your fears in Nauvoo, and continued to
alarm you until you had educated the Mormon mind to believe you to be the "legal
successor." How many thousands of times has the lying cant-phrase been repeated
in our "testimony" meetings: "I know by the Spirit of God, that President Young
is Joseph's legal successor!" The blockheads! They might with equal reason and
truth have said, they knew you to be the legal successor of Benedict Arnold, and
the uncle of Jeff. Davis! But leaving the idea of the rights of the Smith family
out of the question (and I here disclaim all interest in and concern for those
rights, and only refer to them to show how basely and completely you betrayed
them, and to illustrate the perfidity that forms a constituent portion of your
mental constitution), if the church was to be governed by some one in the
"quorums," still there were several persons whose claims logocally and
canonically preceeded yours; and besides, there was an entire council
organization which, as a presiding council, held precedence over the traveling
councillors (or twelve apostles) over which you presided. This was the High
Council of the Church, our ecclesiastical court of last resort, whose president
must be the president of the whole church, and over which Joseph had uniformily
presided as such; while of your quorums the Book of Covenants says: "The twelve
traveling councillors are called to be the twelve apostles, or special witnesses
of the name of Christ, in all the world; thus differing from other officers of
the church in the duties of their calling."
But you had formed a ring composed of Heber C. Kimball, Williard Richards and
others of nearly equal note, and by their aid succeeded in your attempt at
usurpation of the Presidency of the Church. Like traitors sometimes do, you
"flourished like the green bay tree." The cup of your ambition seemed
overflowing in its happy realizations; but the poison of fear and conscious
guilt was there to mar and spoil its enjoyment. You feared your brethren whom
you had cheated and suplanted, and your fraudulently won honors rest uneasily
upon you. You feared that they would do unto you what you would certainly have
done unto them had their case been yours. Hence body-guards to protect your
person.
After you had removed to Salt Lake and domiciled your family within that
semi-fortification and those comfortable houses, built of tithing materials and
unrequited, conscripted labor, and had become firmly fixed on the throne of the
"kingdom," you still kept up the useless watch, turning your office into a small
armory, where the most approved patterns of fire-arms were kept ready for a
moment's use. The reasons for all this were, first the original cause of fear
which still remained; second, there might be husbands lurking around, whose
wives you had corrupted and stolen, who might consider a moment of sweet revenge
to be an equivalent for a life-time of wretchedness and misery in their once
happy, but now desolate homes; third, you had introduced your doctrine of "blood
atonement," and the friends of recusant Mormons, murdered in prosecution of it
decrees, might take it into their heads to get even. And (with the exception of
a few contemptable outsiders, who crawl around the horizon of your murky
firmament, and, in the permitted distance, humble themselves in shameless
abjectiveness before you, and lick dirt in the hope that "favor may follow
fawning") your insensate fear of Gentiles who never yet have harmed you, and
probably never will unlawfully; together with the latent yet ever-increasing
fear and distrust of your own anointed brotherhood, caused by your insatiable
avarice, your never-ending series of dishonest and treacherous dealings with
them, and their increasing disregard for you. These are among the reasons why
you keep yourself so secluded and carefully guarded, why you do not mix freely
with the populace; why you did not celebrate the [natal] day of our country with
the congregated masses of citizens in Salt Lake City; why you did not then and
there occupy your wonted post of honor in the great Tabernacle; why you fled
like the wicked who flee when no man pursueth, and with palpitating heart wore
out your own "little old" Fourth of July as best you could! And, so, in the
midst of pleasures, surrounded by obsequious flatterers and pliant flunkeys; in
the midst of piles of wealth and multiplied outward evidences of grandeur; in
the midst of your ambition and dreams of royalty and greatness, this constant
fear of assassination is the imaginary sword which hangs over your head
suspended by a single hair; it is the acid which sours and poisons your every
cup of sweetness, and turns your simplest beverages into blood. Sir, how nobly
you must have acted toward the offspring of Joseph; how guileless your heart;
how great the "wisdom of your administration;" how thoroughly you have won and
kept the confidence of your brethren, and of all just men, seeing that you have
a chronic torment in the fear of being killed by somebody in the church or out!
ARGUS.