Mormon History
Mark Twain on Mormon History - 1871
"I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it." Page 85
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.